Researchers discover a rare ‘triple ring galaxy’ that defies explanation

On November 13, 2024By Pranco

No, that’s not an interstellar rose. This remarkable image, captured by Japan Subaru Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii actually shows something much more special: an extremely rare triple-ring galaxy about 800 million light-years from Earth, officials at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan wrote in a statement. How it came to be remains a cosmic mystery.

Below standard Hubble series According to the classification method, galaxies generally fall into one of four categories: elliptical, lenticular, spiral, and irregular. Elliptical galaxies look fairly smooth and egg-shaped through a telescope, with an even distribution of stars. Lenticular galaxies look a bit like flattened ellipses with a bulge in the middle – imagine looking at a fried egg from the side. Spiral galaxies, like ours Milky Wayhave a similar central bulge, but instead of an outer disk they have swirling stellar ‘arms’. And irregular galaxies, as their name suggests, do not have a predictable, organized shape.

But ring galaxies don’t fit into these neat categories. This has led some researchers and citizen scientists to argue that the Hubble sequence – the most widely used method for categorizing galaxies – is in need of a serious update.

Although Hubble-sequence galaxies tend to follow one of two predictable evolutionary paths, no one knows for sure how ring galaxies form. One of the leading hypotheses is that they arise from collisions between galaxies. When another galaxy hits the center of a spiral galaxy, it creates ripples of gas and dust that radiate out as a shock wave, creating a ring, the theory suggests.

Another hypothesis is that galactic rings are the result of natural resonance phenomena. As the interstellar gas moves in a galaxy, it tends to collect in certain areas due to gravitational effects. Under certain conditions, this could create a distinctive ring shape around the Milky Way – or even more than one.

Galaxy Cruisethe citizen science project responsible for classifying Subaru images currently considers ring galaxies to be the result of collisions. Whether this triple ring system was formed by multiple collisions, a single collision or in some other way is still unknown. But one thing is certain: finding strange creatures like this helps us refine our overall understanding of the universe and galactic formation.