SUPER RARE DOUGHNUT SHAPED GALAXY FOUND 11 BILLION LIGHT YEARS FROM EARTH
The discovery could lead to insights into the formation and evolution of early galaxies
Astronomers have captured an image of a galaxy shaped like a ‘cosmic ring of fire’, using data gathered by the WM Keck Observatory in Hawaii and images recorded by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.
The circular galaxy, dubbed R5519, is located 11 billion light-years away from us, and is roughly the same mass as the Milky Way. It has a hole in its centre that is two billion times longer than the distance between the Sun and the Earth, and is a hotbed of star-making activity.
“It is a very curious object that we’ve never seen before. It looks strange and familiar at the same time,” said lead researcher Dr Tiantian Yuan, from Australia’s ARC Centre of Excellence for All Sky Astrophysics in 3 Dimensions (ASTRO 3D). “It is making stars at a rate 50 times greater than the Milky Way. Most of that activity is taking place on its ring – so it truly is a ring of fire.”
Since it is 11 billion light-years away, the researchers are currently observing what was occurring in R5519 11 billion years ago, as it has taken that long for the light to travel from the galaxy to Earth. This means that they are seeing R5519 just three billion years after the Big Bang, making it an ideal candidate for the study of galaxy formation and evolution.
The data suggests that R5519 is a collisional ring galaxy – a galaxy that formed as a result of immense and violent encounters with other galaxies, rather than the more common type of ring galaxy that forms due to internal processes. If so, it would be the first collisional ring galaxy ever located in the early Universe.
According to the researchers, these findings could have implications for helping scientists to understand how galaxies form. “The collisional formation of ring galaxies requires a thin disk [defining features of spiral galaxies] to be present in the ‘victim’ galaxy before the collision occurs,” said co-author Prof Kenneth Freeman from the Australian National University. “In the case of this ring galaxy, we are looking back into the early Universe by 11 billion years, into a time when thin disks were only just assembling. For comparison, the thin disk of our Milky Way began to come together only about nine billion years ago. This discovery is an indication that disk assembly in spiral galaxies occurred over a more extended period than previously thought.”
“It is making stars at a rate 50 times greater than the Milky Way. Most of that activity is taking place on its ring. It truly is a ring of fire”