Galaxy Clusters in the Presence of Substructure Evan Tucker 10.1184/R1/10550579.v1 https://kilthub.cmu.edu/articles/thesis/Galaxy_Clusters_in_the_Presence_of_Substructure/10550579 My thesis focused on developing an end-to-end program for dynamical analyses of galaxy clusters. The main interest of the thesis is to develop a dynamical mass estimator used for galaxy clusters that has the capability to account for substructure which is currently a limitation on most dynamical mass estimators. Through already established collaborations, I had access to a cutting-edge multi-object spectrograph, the Michigan/Magellan Fiber System (M2FS), on the 6.5m Clay-Magellan Telescope in Chile; therefore, a signi ant portion of my thesis involved the collection, data<br>reduction, and spectral analysis of new galaxy spectra. As part of this collaboration, I became a core member of the M2FS observation team, which sent me to Chile about<br>a half dozen times to aid in the observations with M2FS.<br>The early portions of my thesis project focused on the handling of newly obtained galaxy spectra with M2FS. The first M2FS observations of galaxies within clusters<br>were collected in November 2013 as a pilot program for testing this instruments capabilities at observing unresolved stellar populations. My goal with this portion of<br>the project was to familiarize myself with the M2FS instrument and it's observations as well as to learn how to reduce the collected data. As part of this familiarization,<br>I learned first-hand how to observe with M2FS and aid in the collection of other observations over a variety of scienti fic interests. While reducing my own observations, I developed a front-end GUI to simplify the data reduction process and help expedite the reduction of future observations. Although, the data reduction pipeline I developed works well at reducing a subset of M2FS observations, I was unable generalize the pipeline fully to handle all M2FS configurations. This is due to variations between configurations such as resolution settings, multi-order spectra, and wavelength coverages. I also helped in the collection of spectra with M2FS over a range of scientifi c<br>purposes. For projects more related to my own work, I collected spectra for galaxies within the clusters Abell 1689, MACS0429, and CL 1301. MACS0429 was part of my own research project and so I detail in this thesis the targeting, observation, data reduction, and spectral fi ts.<br><br> 2019-11-22 21:15:12 cosmology observations extragalactic modeling