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. 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.
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.
The evidence suggests it is a type known as a “collisional ring galaxy,” making it the first one ever located in the early Universe.
There are two kinds of ring galaxies. The more common type forms because of internal processes. Collisional ones form — as the name suggests — as a result of immense and violent encounters with other galaxies.
In the nearby “local” Universe they are 1000 times rarer than the internally created type. Images of the much more distant R5519 stem from about 10.8 billion years ago, just three billion years after the Big Bang. They indicate that collisional ring galaxies have always been extremely uncommon.
The collisional formation of ring galaxies requires a thin disk to be present in the ‘victim’ galaxy before the collision occurs.
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.
— source ARC Centre of Excellence for All Sky Astrophysics in 3D (ASTRO 3D) | May 25, 2020