3C 297 is located about 9.2 billion light-years away in the constellation of Virgo and contains a quasar, a supermassive black hole pulling in gas at the center of the galaxy and driving powerful jets of matter seen in radio waves.
The environment of 3C 297, appears to have the key features of a galaxy cluster, enormous structures that usually contain hundreds or even thousands of galaxies. Yet this galaxy stands alone.
This result made with NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the International Gemini Observatory may push the limits for how quickly astronomers expect galaxies to grow in the early Universe.
“It seems that we have a galaxy cluster that is missing almost all of its galaxies,” said Dr. Valentina Missaglia, an astronomer at the University of Torino.
“We expected to see at least a dozen galaxies about the size of the Milky Way, yet we see only one.”
Dr. Missaglia and her colleagues see two key traits of a galaxy cluster in the Chandra X-ray data.
First, the X-ray data reveals the lone galaxy is surrounded by large quantities of gas with temperatures of tens of millions of degrees — something normally seen in galaxy clusters.
Second, the supermassive black hole’s jet has created an intense source of X-rays about 140,000 light-years away, implying that it has plowed into gas surrounding the galaxy.
A third trait of galaxy clusters possessed by 3C 297, previously reported in Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array data, is that one of the radio jets is bent, showing that it has interacted with its surroundings.
Despite having these important features of a galaxy cluster, the new data from the Gemini Observatory revealed that none of the 19 galaxies that appear close to 3C 297 in an optical image, and that have accurate distance measurements, are actually at the same distance as the lonely galaxy.
“The question is, what happened to all of these galaxies?” said Dr. Juan Madrid, an astronomer at the University of Texas, Rio Grande…
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