Cosmic Ring of Fire' 11 Billion Years Ago: How did structures in early universe form? Unusual galaxy set to prompt rethink on how structures in the universe form
They're calling this galaxy R5519. They say it can help determine when spiral galaxies begin to develop.
If it's a Ring of Fire, perhaps they should name this galaxy after Johnny Cash.
Astronomers have captured an image of a super-rare type of galaxy -- described as a "cosmic ring of fire" -- as it existed 11 billion years ago.
The galaxy, which has roughly the mass of the Milky Way, is circular with a hole in the middle, rather like a titanic doughnut. Its discovery, announced in the journal Nature Astronomy, is set to shake up theories about the earliest formation of galactic structures and how they evolve.
"It is a very curious object that we've never seen before," said lead researcher Dr Tiantian Yuan, from Australia's ARC Centre of Excellence for All Sky Astrophysics in 3 Dimensions (ASTRO 3D). "It looks strange and familiar at the same time."
The galaxy, named R5519, is 11 billion light-years from the Solar System. The hole at its centre is truly massive, with a diameter two billion times longer than the distance between the Earth and the Sun. To put it another way, it is three million times bigger than the diameter of the supermassive black hole in the galaxy Messier 87, which in 2019 became the first ever to be directly imaged.
"It is making stars at a rate 50 times greater than the Milky Way," said Dr Yuan, who is an ASTRO 3D Fellow based at the Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing at Swinburne University of Technology, in the state of Victoria.
They're calling this galaxy R5519. They say it can help determine when spiral galaxies begin to develop.
ASTRO 3D co-author, Dr Ahmed Elagali, based at the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research in Western Australia, said studying R5519 would help determine when spiral galaxies began to develop.
"Further, constraining the number density of ring galaxies through cosmic time can also be used to put constraints on the assembly and evolution of local-like galaxy groups," he added.
If it's a Ring of Fire, perhaps they should name this galaxy after Johnny Cash.