Discovery of a transparent sightline at ρ ≲ 20 kpc from an interacting pair of galaxies

We report the discovery of a transparent sightline at projected distances of ρ ≲ 20 kpc to an interacting pair of mature galaxies at z = 0.12. The sightline of the UV-bright quasar PG 1522+101 at z_em = 1.328 passes at ρ = 11.5 kpc from the higher mass galaxy (M_* = 10^10.6 M_⊙) and ρ = 20.4 kpc from the lower mass one (M_* = 10^10.0 M_⊙). The two galaxies are separated by 9 kpc in projected distance and 30 km s^-1 in line-of-sight velocity. Deep optical images reveal tidal features indicative of close interactions. Despite the small projected distances, the quasar sightline shows little absorption associated with the galaxy pair with a total H I column density no greater than log N({H I})/cm^{-2}=13.65. This limiting H I column density is already two orders of magnitude less than what is expected from previous halo gas studies. In addition, we detect no heavy-element absorption features associated with the galaxy pair with 3σ limits of log N({Mg II})/cm^{-2} < 12.2 and log N({O VI})/cm^{-2} < 13.7. The probability of seeing such little absorption in a sightline passing at a small projected distance from two non-interacting galaxies is 0.2 per cent. The absence of strong absorbers near the close galaxy pair suggests that the cool gas reservoirs of the galaxies have been significantly depleted by the galaxy interaction. These observations therefore underscore the potential impact of galaxy interactions on the gaseous haloes around galaxies.