Spectroscopic Confirmation of two Extremely Massive Protoclusters BOSS1244 and BOSS1542 at $z=2.24$

Abstract

We present spectroscopic confirmation of two new massive galaxy protoclusters at $z=2.24\pm 0.02$, BOSS1244 and BOSS1542, traced by groups of Coherently Strong Ly$\alpha$ Absorption (CoSLA) systems imprinted in the absorption spectra of a number of quasars from the SDSS III and identified as overdensities of narrowband-selected H$\alpha$ emitters (HAEs). Using MMT/MMIRS and LBT/LUCI near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy, we confirm 46 and 36 HAEs in the BOSS1244 and BOSS1542 fields, respectively. BOSS1244 displays a South-West (SW) component at $z=2.230\pm 0.002$ and another North-East (NE) component at $z=2.246\pm 0.001$ with the line-of-sight velocity dispersions of $405\pm 202$ km s${}^{-1}$ and $377\pm 99$ km s${}^{-1}$, respectively. Interestingly, we find that the SW region of BOSS1244 contains two substructures in redshift space, likely merging to form a larger system. In contrast, BOSS1542 exhibits an extended filamentary structure with a low velocity dispersion of $247\pm 32$ km s${}^{-1}$ at $z=2.241\pm 0.001$, providing a direct confirmation of a large-scale cosmic web in the early Universe. The galaxy overdensities ${\delta }_{\mathrm{g}}$ on the scale of 15 cMpc are $22.9\pm 4.9$, $10.9\pm 2.5$, and $20.5\pm 3.9$ for the BOSS1244 SW, BOSS1244 NE, and BOSS1542 filament, respectively. They are the most overdense galaxy protoclusters (${\delta }_{\mathrm{g}}>20$) discovered to date at $z>2$. These systems are expected to become virialized at $z\sim 0$ with a total mass of $M_{\mathrm{SW}}=(1.59\pm 0.20)\times 10^{15}$ $M_{\odot }$, $M_{\mathrm{NE}}=(0.83\pm 0.11)\times 10^{15}$ $M_{\odot }$ and $M_{\mathrm{filament}}=(1.42\pm 0.18)\times 10^{15}$ $M_{\odot }$, respectively. Together with BOSS1441 described in Cai et al. (2017a), these extremely massive overdensities at $z=2-3$ exhibit different morphologies, indicating that they are in different assembly stages in the formation of early galaxy clusters.

arXiv comment28 pages, 13 figures, 6 tables, accepted for publication in ApJ. The complete Abstract is presented in the manuscript

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