Hubble Telescope Reveals Unusual Ring-Shaped Galaxy in New Image

The barred spiral galaxy MCG+07-07-072 has thin, loosely wound arms emerging from the ends of its barred core, creating a rather unusual ring shape.

A recently released image by the Hubble Space Telescope has shown that a galaxy’s arms stretch and form a circle around the central disk almost as a near-perfect one.

Formally, this spiral galaxy has the designation MCG+07-07-072 and belongs to the cluster of galaxies Perseus, the distance from which varies for 320 millions of light-years. The galaxy has thin and very loosely wound arms originating from the ends of the bar, which gives the galaxy’s shape a rather unique appearance according to observations made by NASA.

“Rings in galaxies are not very rare but are of several types, running from merely rare to fairly unique and scientifically interesting,” NASA officials said in the statement.

MCG+07-07-072 has been identified and characterized as a barred spiral galaxy because of the presence of elongated bar that has formed from stars in the mid of the galaxy. But its overall type is SBc(r), this indicates that, its spiral arms originate from the core, the bar, and it goes only half a circle round the galaxy. “The term ‘ring galaxy’ is only used for peculiar galaxies with a ring like circular structure of forming gas and stars separated from the galactic core – or in some cases with an obviously missing nucleus,” said NASA officials.

Thus, it is believed that Ring galaxies are formed due to collisions of two or more Galaxies. For example, encounters such as someone of a smaller galaxy orbiting through the heart of a larger body can create displacements resulting into a spread of the spiral arms of the larger galaxy similar to the creation of waves.

There is another mechanism known as gravitational lensing which may result, for instance, in ringlike appearance of the galaxy: a massive body at the foreground attracts light and distorts it, so the image of the background object is formed by a ring, arcs, or several points.

“Einstein rings, which are circle-shaped images, form only when the lensing and the imaged galaxy are aligned in the same plane,” added the NASA officials.

This new Hubble image released on August 16, also depicts several stars with conspicuous diffraction spikes. These stars look larger in this image because they are in front of MCG + 07-07-072 and nearer to the earth than the galaxy.

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