Using data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and Gemini Observatory, an international team of astronomers
Scientists accidentally discovered a single galaxy.It was named 3C 297 and is located at a distance of about 9.2 billion light years from Earth. In the center of the galaxy there is a quasar that emits powerful jets that are very bright in the radio spectrum. The characteristics of its environment hint that 3C 297 is, in fact, a cluster of galaxies. However, she seems lonely. “We seem to be observing a galaxy cluster in which almost all the galaxies are missing,” explains Valentina Missaglia, an astrophysicist with a PhD at the University of Turin. “We expected to see at least a dozen galaxies the size of the Milky Way, but we only saw one.”
“The question is what happened to everyonethese galaxies? We think that the gravitational pull of one large object combined with other interactions between the galaxies was too strong, and they merged. For these galaxies, apparently, resistance was useless,” the scientist added. In other words, one galaxy absorbed all its former satellites.
Although the authors cannot exclude the possibilityexistence of dwarf galaxies located around 3C 297, their presence still does not explain why there are no larger objects nearby. Based on this study, scientists suggested that something similar happened in the early Universe and that galaxies grew much faster than thought.
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Cover: Composite image of a lone galaxy containing a supermassive black hole, two jets, and an X-ray hot spot surrounded by hot gas
Image Credit & Copyright: NASA MSFC/SAO/Chandra