Heinz Andernach
M. Ramos Ceja
Radio Properties of Brightest Cluster Members (BCMs)
From the Abell catalog of clusters of galaxies we select a subsample of 1207 clusters likely to have a dominant galaxy, namely those with Bautz-Morgan type I and I-II, with Rood-Sastry type ``cD'', and those with textual notes in the Abell catalog hinting at the presence of galaxies with ``coronae''. By visual inspection of Digitized Sky Survey images Coziol et al. (2009, AJ, in press) identified 1426 candidates for brightest cluster members (BCMs) located in 1221 different redshift components associated with 1169 different Abell clusters from the above sample. We used the images and catalogs of existing radio surveys (NVSS, SUMSS, FIRST, WENSS, etc.) as well as the literature to collect radio fluxes and radio morphologies for these BCMs. More than half of the 1426 BCMs are detected, but the majority of them in only the most sensitive surveys (FIRST, NVSS, SUMSS) at a single frequency. However, for over 300 BCMs we are able to construct radio continuum spectra. We present our results of a search of relations between various radio and optical characteristics of the BCM, like radio luminosity, radio morphology and spectral index, optical morphology and ellipticity, peculiar velocity within their host cluster, as well as the radio-optical alignment angle.