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Description
The Hercules supercluster consists of the Abell clusters A2147, A2151, and A2152. Previous studies of the kinematics have been confounded by the difficulty of correctly assigning galaxies to the individual clusters, which are not well separated. Our study has a total of 468 available velocities for galaxies in the region, 175 of them new. There are 414 galaxies in the supercluster, about 3 times the number used in the previous supercluster study. We verify the existence of the three individual clusters and compute their individual dynamical parameters. We investigate several techniques for assigning galaxy membership to clusters in this crowded field. We use the Kaye's mixture model (Ashman, Bird, & Zepf, 1994AJ....108.2348A) algorithm to separate the galaxies into clusters; we find that A2152 has a higher mean velocity than previous studies have reported. A2147 and A2152 also have lower velocity dispersions: 821^+68^_-55_ and 715^+81^_-61_km/s, respectively. The assignment of galaxies to either A2152 or A2147 requires velocity and position information. We study the kinematics of the supercluster using the two-body formalism of Beers, Geller, & Huchra (1982ApJ...257...23B) and conclude that A2147 and A2151 are probably bound to each other and that the supercluster as a whole may also be bound. The mass of the supercluster, if bound, is (7.6+/-2.0)x10^15^h^-1^M_{sun}_; with the supercluster luminosity, (1.4+/-0.2)x10^13^h^-2^L_{sun}_, this yields {OMEGA}=0.34+/-0.1.
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