Optical Confirmation of X-ray selected Galaxy clusters from the Swift AGN and Cluster survey with MDM and Pan-STARRS Data (Paper III)

Abstract: To understand structure formation in the universe and impose stronger constraints on the cluster mass function and cosmological models, it is important to have large galaxy cluster catalogs. The Swift AGN and Cluster Survey is a serendipitous X-ray survey aimed at building a large statistically selected X-ray cluster catalog with 442 cluster candidates in its first release. Our initial SDSS follow-up study confirmed $50\%$ of clusters in the SDSS footprint as z $<$ 0.5 clusters. Here, we present further optical follow-up analysis of 248 (out of 442) cluster candidates from the Swift cluster catalog using multi-band imaging from the MDM $2.4m$ telescope and the Pan-STARRS survey. We report the optical confirmation of 55 clusters with $> 3\sigma$ galaxy overdensities and detectable red sequences in the color-magnitude space. The majority of these confirmed clusters have redshifts z $<$ 0.6. The remaining candidates are potentially higher redshift clusters that are excellent targets for infrared observations. We report the X-ray luminosity and the optical richness for these confirmed clusters. We also discuss the distinction between X-ray and optical observables for the detected and non-detected cluster candidates.