An international team of astronomers used the MeerKAT radio telescope to study giant radio galaxies as part of the Survey of Cosmological Evolution (COSMOS). They found a new giant radio galaxy that has not been reported before. The discovery was presented in a research paper published by Preprocessing Server on November 11. arXiv.

So-called giant radio galaxies (GRGs) are radio galaxies with a total estimated linear length of at least 2.3 million light-years. These are rare objects that typically grow in low-density environments and have been observed to exhibit jets and plumes of synchrotron plasma. GRGs are important for astronomers to study the formation and evolution of radio sources.

The MeerKAT radio interferometer, located in South Africa, is an excellent tool for studying GRGs at high frequencies (about 1.0 GHz). So a team of astronomers led by Kathleen Charlton from the University of Cape Town in South Africa used MeerKAT to check for known GRGs in the COSMOS field. The research was conducted as part of the MeerKAT International GHz Incremental Extragalactic Exploration (MIGHTEE) survey.

“We present spatially resolved spectral index and age maps of three GRGs in the COSMOS field using MIGHTEE L-band data and new UHF MeerKAT band observations,” the researchers write in the paper.

Charlton’s team examined three giant radio galaxies using the MeerKAT telescope. One of these turned out to be the first identified and was designated MGTC J100022.85+031520.4.

According to the research, MGTC J100022.85+031520.4 is located in the SDSS J100022.85+031520 elliptical galaxy with a redshift of approximately 0.1034. The new GRG has an estimated linear size of approximately 4.2 million light-years, a mass of 93 trillion solar masses, and a total power of 597 ZW/Hz at 1284 MHz.

The data collected shows that the dynamic age of MGTC J100022.85+031520.4 is approximately one billion years and its jet has a power of one million QW.

Observations have shown that MGTC J100022.85+031520.4 is the central galaxy and the brightest cluster galaxy (BCG) in the WHL J100022.9+031521 galaxy cluster. This therefore makes it one of only 4% of GRGs known to be in cluster environments.

In conclusion, the authors of the paper stated that MGTC J100022.85+031520.4’s location at the center of the cluster and the twisted morphology observed in the upper lobe suggest that it has properties similar to wide-angle tail galaxies. (WAT) radio resources. In general, WAT radio sources are strong and often located at the centers of galaxy clusters; where the average pressure within the cluster can bend the leaves into the characteristic C shape.