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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.
"It is a very curious object that we've never seen before," said lead researcher Dr. Tiantian Yuan, from Australia's ARC Centre of Excellence for All Sky Astrophysics in 3 Dimensions (ASTRO 3-D). "It looks strange and familiar at the same time."
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. To put it another way, it is three million times bigger than the diameter of the supermassive black hole in the galaxy Messier 87, which in 2019 became the first ever to be directly imaged.
"It is making stars at a rate 50 times greater than the Milky Way," said Dr. Yuan, who is an ASTRO 3-D Fellow based at the Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing at Swinburne University of Technology, in the state of Victoria.
"Most of that activity is taking place on its ring—so it truly is a ring of fire."
Journal Reference:
Tiantian Yuan, Ahmed Elagali, Ivo Labbé, et al. A giant galaxy in the young Universe with a massive ring, Nature Astronomy (DOI: 10.1038/s41550-020-1102-7)
(Score: 4, Funny) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Friday May 29 2020, @09:55PM (1 child)
And have the flames grown higher?
And does it burn, burn burn?
This ring of fire?
This ring of fire.....
Contraction is a real thing
And it leaves a fiery ring
Bound by gravity's desire
Stars coalesced from the ring of fire
We fell in to the burning ring of 5519
It went down, down, down, and the blackness grew higher
There's no light, light light
Round [the] ring of fire... ring of fire.
The taste... of mass is sweet
And it makes a lot of heat
I fell for you not so mild
Oh, the event horizon was wild....
Go fall in to the burning ring round 5519
Keep going down, down, down, where the blackness grows higher
There's no light, light light
Round [the] ring of fire... ring of fire.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 29 2020, @10:10PM
I modded you Informative because I came here to make a similar reference. It is Informative and not Funny because I'm not confident that too many people will get the reference, and I walk the line.