Discovery of a Jetlike Structure at the High-Redshift QSO CXOMP J084128.3+131107

Abstract

The Chandra Multiwavelength Project has discovered a jetlike structure associated with a newly recognized QSO at redshift z = 1.866. The system was 9farcm4 off-axis during an observation of 3C 207. Although significantly distorted by the mirror point-spread function, we use both a ray trace and a nearby bright point source to show that the X-ray image must arise from some combination of point and extended sources, or else from a minimum of three distinct point sources. We favor the former situation, as three unrelated sources would have a small probability of occurring by chance in such a close alignment. We show that interpretation as a jet emitting X-rays via inverse Compton scattering on the cosmic microwave background is plausible. This would be a surprising and unique discovery of a radio-quiet QSO with an X-ray jet, since we have obtained upper limits of 100 μJy on the QSO emission at 8.46 GHz and limits of 200 μJy for emission from the putative jet.