The ring galaxy, known as GS18660, may be the result of a collision between two galaxies, the researchers reported in their study, published Sept. 8 in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
"In this sense, the galaxy system is quite unique and may give us important information about early galaxy formation," Conselice said in an email.
"We therefore did not target GS18660 specifically as a ring galaxy," Michele Perna, a postdoctoral researcher at the Spanish Astrobiology Center and the first author of the study, told Live Science in an email. "When we observed it with JWST [Near-Infrared Spectrograph instrument], the much more detailed data revealed the prominent ring structure and allowed us to investigate the galaxy in three dimensions."
Another view of GS18660 as seen in an earlier Hubble Space Telescope survey. (Image credit: Pera et. al/ Astronomy and Astrophysics)
Intruder-driven rings
When a small galaxy plunges through the center of a larger galaxy, the impact creates a wave of dense gas that ripples outward, similar to how water moves when a stone is dropped into a pond. As a result, a collisional galaxy is formed. Gas piles up along the wave and forms stars, producing a ring. These galaxies are rare in the local universe, and the few candidates found in the distant universe have been hard to confirm.
Its position is also important, Perna added — the companion is located roughly along the main galaxy's minor axis, consistent with where an intruder would be expected to appear after a head-on plunge through the galaxy's disk.
He explained that it is difficult to determine the age of a past interaction directly, but that if one did occur, it must have happened around the time a rapid star-formation episode began and its age should be consistent with the average ages of the star clusters.
"It is not, by itself, definitive proof of a collision, but together with the bridge and the ring morphology, it strengthens the case for a recent impact," Perna noted.
"If GS18660 is confirmed as a collisional ring, it would therefore suggest that we need to revisit our estimates of how frequently these systems occur in the distant universe," Perna said
Another explanation?
Conselice thinks the evidence presented in the paper is consistent with a genuine collisional origin for the ring. "It looks to me like the merger hypothesis is more likely, given the nearby galaxy intruder and the stability of the intruder galaxy and the main galaxy itself," Conselice said. “Overall, it is convincing evidence that a past interaction and/or merger has occurred for this galaxy system based on the light distribution."
Related storiesThe other competing explanation involves a stellar bar. It proposes that the ring was not made by an intruder at all. GS18660 also shows a bar-like structure running north to south, and bars can funnel gas and stars into rings at specific distances from the center. Perna said the team cannot yet tell whether this is a true stellar bar or a result of the interaction.
"Whether the ring was triggered by another galaxy or by the internal dynamics of GS18660," Perna said, "the result would tell us something important about how galaxies were already becoming structurally organised when the universe was only a few billion years old."
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