THE ALIGNMENT OF GALAXY STRUCTURES

We analyzed the orientation of the sample of ACO galaxy clusters. We examined the alignment in a subsample of 1056 galaxy structures taken from the Panko–Flin (2006) Catalog with known BM morphological types. We were looking for a correlation between the orientation of the cluster and the positions of neighboring clusters. The Binggeli effect (the excess of small values of the Δθ angles between the direction toward neighboring clusters and the cluster position angle) is observed, having a range up to about 45 h−1 Mpc. The strongest effect was found for elongated BM type I clusters. This is probably connected with the origins of the supergiant galaxy and with cluster formation along a long filament or plane in a supercluster.