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  • BBC Science Focus Magazine

    SUPER-RARE DOUGHNUT-SHAPED GALAXY FOUND 11 BILLION LIGHT-YEARS FROM EARTH

    Jun 25, 2020 9 minutes

    Astronomers have captured an image of a galaxy shaped like a ‘cosmic ring of fire’, using data gathered by the WM Keck Observatory in Hawaii and images recorded by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.

    The circular galaxy, dubbed R5519, is located 11 billion light-years away from us, and is roughly the same mass as the Milky Way. It has a hole in its centre that is two billion times longer than the distance between the Sun and the Earth, and is a hotbed of star-making activity.

    “It is a very curious object that we’ve never seen before. It looks strange and familiar at the same time,” said lead researcher Dr Tiantian Yuan, from Australia’s ARC Centre of Excellence for All Sky Astrophysics in 3 Dimensions (ASTRO 3D). “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.”

    “It is making stars at a rate 50 times greater than the Milky Way. Most of that activity is taking place on its ring. It truly is a ring of fire”

    Since it is 11 billion light-years away, the researchers are currently observing what was occurring in R5519 11 billion years ago, as it has taken that long for the light to travel from the galaxy to Earth. This means that they are seeing R5519 just three billion years after the Big Bang, making it an ideal candidate for the study of galaxy formation and evolution.

    The data suggests that R5519 is a collisional ring galaxy – a galaxy that formed as a result of

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