DEEP PROBING OF THE COMA CLUSTER

As a continuation of our study of the faint galaxy lu- minosity function in the Coma cluster of galaxies, we report here on the first spectroscopic observations of very faint galaxies (R 21.5) in the direction of the core of this cluster. Out of these 34 galaxies, only one may have a redshift consistent with Coma, all others are background objects. The predicted number of Coma galaxies is 6.7 6.0, according to Bernstein et al. (1995, B95). If we add the 17 galaxies observed by Secker (1997), we end up with 5 galaxies belonging to Coma, while the expected number is 16.0 11.0 according to B95. Notice that these two indepen- dent surveys lead to the same results. Although the observations and predicted values agree within the error, such results raise into question the validity of statistical subtraction of background objects commonly used to derive cluster luminosity functions (e.g. B95). More spectroscopic observations in this cluster and others are therefore urgently needed. As a by-product, we report on the discovery of a physical structure at a redshift z'0.5.