Massive cooling flow clusters inhabit crowded environments

With the availability of large-scale redshift survey data, it is now becoming possible to explore correlations between large-scale structure and the properties and morphologies of galaxy clusters. We investigate the spatial distributions of a 98% complete, volume-limited Sample of nearby (z < 0.1) Abell clusters with well-determined redshifts and find that cooling flow clusters with high mass accretion rates have nearest neighbors which are much closer than those of other clusters in the sample (at the 99.8% confidence level) and reside in more crowded environments out to 60 h-(1)(50) Mpc. Several possible explanations of this effect are discussed.