Hoag’s Object is a galaxy located 600 million light years away, containing a galaxy within a galaxy within a galaxy.

WHILE gazing at the serpent constellation in the northern sky, one will notice a strange celestial body known as Hoag’s object. This cosmic puzzle was identified by astronomer Arthur Hoag in the year 1950 and has been a subject of interest among astronomers and enthusiasts ever since.

The Hoag’s object is an unique ring shaped galaxy with an estimated diameter of 100000 light years which is nearly as large as the Milky Way galaxy and is located at a distance of approximately 600 million light years from the earth. An image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and edited by geophysicist Benoit Blanco depicts a glowing ring of billions of blue stars completely encircling a denser core of red stars. Looking at these two magnificent circles, another ring galaxy is also seen here, but much farther than the previous two.

This cosmic event and the forces that enabled the destruction of Hoag’s object still remain a mystery to astronomers. Ring galaxies, which are quite rare, only account for less than 0. One percent of all the known galaxies are what is called Dark Galaxies, making them difficult to examine. Like the previous visions, Hoag himself first suggested that this formation was nothing more than an illusion resulting from gravitational lensing. However, further studies using better instruments have been conducted to disprove this hypothesis.

Another hypothesize is that Hoag’s object was initially a usual disk galaxy with star orbits in the plane of symmetry. It could have been torn apart by a collision with its neighboring galaxy in the ancient past, which could have changed its gravitational configuration. If such a collision had happened in the last 3 billion years, then we should have seen some signs of this event by using radio telescopes. However, there are no such signs at all that have been discovered.

It is possible that a cosmic collision is the cause of Hoag’s object, but the occurrence must have taken place such a long time back that no remnants of it could be seen. Due to the fact that there are only a few other known ring galaxies, and none of them demonstrate the symmetric features that can be observed in this peculiar case of Hoag’s object, it remains a mysterious and intriguing curiosity, much like a turducken that is yet to be deciphered.

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