Lonely Galaxy That Pulled In All Its Neighbors Observed By Chandra X-Ray Observatory

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The Chandra X-ray Observatory captured imagery of a galaxy that "appears to have pulled in and assimilated all of its former companion galaxies." according to NASA. Galaxy 3C297 is 9.2 billion light-years away and harbors a quasar.   Credit: NASA/CXC/A. Hobart

Transcript

00:00Visit Chandra's beautiful universe.

00:053C 297

00:10A distant and lonely galaxy appears to have pulled in and assimilated all of its former companion galaxies.

00:17This result, made with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the International Gemini Observatory,

00:24may push the limits for how quickly astronomers expect galaxies to grow in the early universe.

00:30The unexpectedly solo galaxy is located about 9.2 billion light-years from Earth

00:36and contains a quasar, a supermassive black hole pulling in gas at the center of the galaxy

00:42and driving powerful jets of matter seen in radio waves.

00:47The environment of this galaxy, known as 3C 297, appears to have the key features of a galaxy cluster

00:54enormous structures that usually contain hundreds or even thousands of galaxies.

01:00Yet 3C 297 stands alone.

01:03A team of researchers expected to see at least a dozen galaxies within 3C 297.

01:08Yet they found only one.

01:11Accurate distance measurements from Gemini data revealed that none of the 19 galaxies that appear close to 3C 297

01:18in the optical image are actually at the same distance as the lonely galaxy.

01:23The question is, what happened to all of these galaxies in 3C 297?

01:28The team thinks the gravitational pull of the one large galaxy combined with interactions between the galaxies

01:34was too strong and they merged with the large galaxy.

01:38For these galaxies, apparently resistance was futile.

01:42The researchers think 3C 297 is no longer a galaxy cluster, but a fossil group.

01:49This is the end stage of a galaxy pulling in and merging with several other galaxies.

01:55While many other fossil groups have been detected before, this one is particularly distant, at 9.2 billion light-years away.

02:03The previous record holders for fossil groups were at distances of 4.9 and 7.9 billion light-years.

02:10It may be challenging to explain how the universe can create this system only 4.6 billion years after the Big Bang.

02:17This result doesn't break the current ideas of cosmology,

02:21but it begins to push the limits on how quickly both galaxies and galaxy clusters must have formed.

02:33NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology

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