(ORDO NEWS) — In the 20s of the last century, the popular astronomer Edwin Hubble considered it necessary to divide all galaxies conditionally into three different types. Spiral galaxies are considered the most common. There are more than half of them in our universe. The Milky Way also belongs to spiral galaxies.
About 15% of all existing ones are elliptical galaxies, which differ from the rest in their brightness, which gradually decreases to the edge. The third type includes irregular galaxies that do not have any particular structure.
For a long time, such a classification remained relevant, but today there are galaxies that cannot be included in any of the proposed categories. Objects of this type were called peculiar galaxies. They have the shape of a ring, are very rare and at the moment remain poorly understood.
One of these galaxies was discovered at a distance of almost 11 billion light-years from the Milky Way. In its shape, it looks like a huge donut. In this case, the mass of the galaxy is about the same as that of the Milky Way.
The author of the study, Tiantian Yuan, said that specialists had not encountered anything like this before. Stars in this galaxy form about 50 times faster than ours. It should be noted that almost all processes occur in the region of the galactic ring.
According to scientists, this form could arise due to the fact that there was a collision with another galaxy. When the discovered R5519 was still in the form of a disk, a small galaxy could crash into it and pierce a huge hole in the center. As a result of gravitational processes, the center remained almost empty.
This theory is also confirmed by the fact that a galaxy was discovered nearby, which could provoke the emergence of a similar shape.
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