Emily Chan
The Hubble Space Telescope has captured a stunning new image of a ring-shaped galaxy. It makes a nearly perfect circle around its central disk.
Astronomers refer to the barred spiral galaxy as MCG+07-07-072. It is located in the Perseus Cluster, which is about 320 million light-years away from Earth.
Emerging from the ends of the galaxy’s barred core are thin, loosely wound arms that create an odd shape, according to NASA. Rings in galaxies come in all different forms that range from uncommon to extremely rare.
MCG+07-07-072 is called a barred spiral galaxy because of its central structure of stars that form the shape of a bar. It is officially categorized as an SBc(r) galaxy due to its spiral arms that extend from its barred core. They only complete a half-turn around the galaxy.
“The classification of ‘ring galaxy’ is reserved for peculiar galaxies with a round ring of gas and star formation, much like spiral arms look, but completely disconnected from the galactic nucleus—or even without any visible nucleus!” said NASA officials.
It is thought that ring galaxies form after a collision between two or more galaxies.
For instance, when a smaller galaxy plows through the center of a larger galaxy, the gravitational disruption would trigger a wave of star formation to pass through the larger galaxy and push out its arms, similar to the ripples that are created when a stone is dropped into water.
Additionally, it is possible that the ring-shaped appearance of a galaxy is the result of gravitational lensing, a phenomenon that occurs when a massive celestial body warps the space around it, which causes light from a distant source to be visibly bent.
This distorts the image of a background object into arcs, rings, or multiple points of light. Therefore, collisional ring galaxies have close interactions with one another.
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