MACS J0416.1-2403 using VST and VISTA

The project aims at gathering deep (r<24.4) and wide (approx. 20x20Mpc^2^) observations at optical (u, g, r, i, VST) wavelengths for six massive galaxy clusters at 0.2<z<0.6, complemented with near infrared data (Y, J, Ks, VISTA, ESO public survey GCAV). The aim is to investigate galaxy evolution in a wide range of stellar masses and environmental conditions. This work describes the photometric analysis of the cluster and the definition of a density field, which will be a key ingredient for further studies about galaxy properties in the cluster outskirts.

We extract sources paying particular attention to recover the faintest ones and simultaneously flagging point sources and sources with photometry affected by artefacts in the images. We combine all the extractions in a multi-band catalog that is used to derive photometric redshifts through SED fitting. We then define cluster memberships up to 5r_200_ from the cluster core and measure the density field, comparing galaxy properties in different environments.

We found that the g-r colors show bimodal behaviours in all the environments, but the peak of the distribution of red galaxies shifts toward redder colors with increasing density and the fraction of galaxies in the blue cloud increases with decreasing density. We also found 3 overdense regions in the cluster outskirts at r~5r_200_. Galaxies in these structures have mean densities and luminosities similar to the cluster core.

The color of galaxies suggests the presence of evolved galaxy populations, an insight for pre-processing phenomena over these substructures.We release the multi-band catalog, down to the completeness limit r<24.4mag.