On the Alignment of Galaxies in Clusters

We explore the distribution of position angles (PA) of galaxies in clusters. We selected for study the isolated clusters, since the distribution of the galaxy orientation in clusters with close neighbors could be altered by the gravitational influence of the latter. We assume that galaxies are aligned, if their number at one 90o position angle interval is more than twice higher than at the other 90o interval. We study the galaxy PA distribution at the outer regions of clusters with smaller space density, where the probability of the PA variation in the result of interactions between galaxies is smaller than at the dense central regions. We found that the alignment of galaxies is more often observed in poor clusters and concluded that originally galaxies were aligned, but in the result of accretion in time of field galaxies with arbitrary orientations and also due to the mutual interactions the relative number of aligned galaxies decreases.