Brandon ( Naperville North H.S.)
Mentor: Marcelle Soares-Santos
Galaxy clusters are the most massive structures known to man, and a heated topic of research in the astrophysical world, and one of the primary research focuses of Fermilab's Dark Energy Survey. DES is a sky survey that began collecting optical data last year, and plans to survey about 5000 square degrees of the sky, making it the largest survey in history. This summer, I worked under Marcelle Soares-Santos and Huan Lin in analyzing the data of galaxy clusters taken by DES and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey using an unconventional cluster finding method-Voronoi Tessellation. I used numerous other established catalogs (SZ, MCXC, XMM, and SDSS), and equations relating certain parameters reported to mass to compare this data. What I found was that the DES data was off of other catalogs by a semi-consistent factor of two to three, indicating a consistent flaw in the VT weak lensing mass measuring method calibration. Furthermore, most of the VT galaxies did not find matches with other catalogs, indicating flaws in the VT catalog that may have to be investigated further.