How many rings can galaxies have? This is what a recent study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters hopes to address as an international team of researchers discovered a unique galaxy with nine rings, possessing six more rings than any known galaxy, that they aptly named the Bullseye Galaxy. This study has the potential to help researchers better understand the formation and evolution of galaxies throughout the universe, potentially resulting in identifying where we could find life.
The Bullseye Galaxy is known as a collisional ring galaxy (CRG) and whose radius is approximately 70 kiloparsecs (228,309 light-years), which is two and a half times larger than our Milky Way Galaxy, which is known as a spiral galaxy. After significant image analysis from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and the W. M. Keck Observatory, the researchers estimate the Bullseye Galaxy was created approximately 50 million years ago when a smaller blue dwarf galaxy collided with the center of the former, resulting in nine giant rings like ripples being created when a pebble is dropped in a water.
Image of the Bullseye Galaxy. (Credit: NASA, ESA, Imad Pasha (Yale), Pieter van Dokkum (Yale))
“This was a serendipitous discovery,” said Imad Pasha, who is a PhD student in the Department of Astronomy at Yale University and lead author of the study. “I was looking at a ground-based imaging survey and when I saw a galaxy with several clear rings, I was immediately drawn to it. I had to stop to investigate it.”
Going forward, the researchers aspire to learn more about which stars existed in Bullseye before and after the collision that caused its record-setting rings. Additionally, the upcoming launch of NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope in fall 2026 will provide a significant advancement in observing galaxies, resulting in potentially discovering more galaxies like Bullseye.
What new discoveries about the Bullseye Galaxy will researchers make in the coming years and decades? Only time will tell, and this is why we science!
As always, keep doing science & keep looking up!
Sources: The Astrophysical Journal Letters, EurekAlert!