Hoag's Object

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 Hoag's Object 


Have you heard of Hoag's Object? It's actually an uncommon ring galaxy located in the Serpens Caput constellation. It was first spotted by Arthur Hoag in 1950, who believed it to be either a planetary nebula or a peculiar galaxy. The galaxy is estimated to contain around eight billion stars and spans roughly 120,000 light years.                  

 Hoag's Object is home to a nearly perfect circle of young, hot, blue stars that encircle an older, yellow nucleus. This ring galaxy, located in the constellation Serpens, sits about 600 million light-years away. Its ring structure is so precise and circular that it has been referred to as "The most perfect ring galaxy". The inner core of the galaxy, measuring about 6 arcseconds in diameter, is approximately 17±0.7 kly (5.3±0.2 kpc) in size, while the surrounding ring has an inner diameter of 28" (75±3 kly or 24.8±1.1 kpc) and an outer diameter of 45" (121±4 kly or 39.9±1.7 kpc). The galaxy is said to have a mass of around 700 billion suns, in comparison to the Milky Way, which has an estimated diameter of 150-200 kly and contains between 100 and 500 billion stars, with a mass between 800 billion and 1.54 trillion suns.


The space between the two different stellar populations in the galaxy may contain some star clusters that are too faint to see. Though ring galaxies are rare, another distant ring galaxy (SDSS J151713.93+213516.8) can be observed through Hoag's Object, located between the nucleus and the outer ring of the galaxy, at around the one o'clock position in the image. Noah Brosch and colleagues have discovered that the bright ring lies at the inner edge of a much bigger neutral hydrogen ring.

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