Structures in Galaxy Clusters

The analysis of the presence of substructures in 16 well-sampled clusters of galaxies suggests a stimulating hypothesis: Clusters could be classified as unimodal or bimodal, on the basis of to the sub-clump distribution in the 3-D space of positions and velocities. The dynamic study of these clusters shows that their fundamental characteristics, in particular the virial masses, are not severely biased by the presence of subclustering if the system considered is bound.