The warps survey. III. The discovery of an X-ray luminous galaxy cluster at z=0.833 and the impact of X-ray substructure on cluster abundance measurements

The Wide Angle ROSAT Pointed Survey team reviews the properties and history of the discovery of Cl J0152.7 - 1357, an X-ray luminous, rich cluster of galaxies at a redshift of z = 0.833. At L-X = 8 x 10(44) h(50)(-2) ergs s(- 1) (0.5-2.0 keV) Cl J0152.7-1357 is the most X-ray luminous cluster known a t redshifts z > 0.55. The high X-ray luminosity of the system suggests that massive clusters may begin to form at redshifts considerably greater than unity. This scenario is supported by the high degree of optical and X-ray s ubstructure in Cl J0152.7-1357, which is similarly complex as that of other X-ray-selected clusters at comparable redshift and consistent with the hyp othesized picture of cluster formation by mass infall along large-scale fil aments. X-ray emission from Cl J0152.7-1357 was detected already in 1980 with the E instein IPC. However, because the complex morphology of the emission caused its significance to be underestimated, the corresponding source was not in cluded in the cluster sample of the Einstein Extended Medium-Sensitivity Su rvey (EMSS) and hence was not previously identified. Simulations of the EMS S source detection and selection procedure performed by us suggest a genera l, mild bias of the EMSS cluster sample against X-ray luminous clusters wit h pronounced substructure. If highly unrelaxed, merging clusters are common at intermediate-to-high re dshift (as is suggested by the current data), they could create a bias in s ome samples as the morphological complexity of mergers may cause them to fa ll below the flux limit of surveys that make the implicit or explicit assum ption of a unimodal spatial source geometry. Conversely, the enhanced X-ray luminosity of mergers might cause them to, temporarily, rise above the flu x limit. Either effect could lead to erroneous conclusions about the evolut ion of the comoving cluster space density. A high fraction of morphological ly complex clusters at high redshift would also call into question the vali dity of evolutionary studies (and, specifically, cosmological conclusions) which implicitly or explicitly assume that the systems under investigation are virialized.