A team of astronomers, led by Yale University, has made an exciting discovery—a giant galaxy with a record-breaking nine rings!
The galaxy, officially named LEDA 1313424 but nicknamed “Bullseye,” formed its rings about 50 million years ago when a smaller galaxy crashed into its center.
This impact sent waves of gas outward, creating beautiful, expanding rings—just like a dart hitting the bullseye in a game.
Imad Pasha, a Yale doctoral student and lead author of the study, said this galaxy is special because it has more rings than any other known galaxy of its kind. “It’s a rare find. We caught it at just the right time and from the perfect angle,” he said.
Pasha first noticed Bullseye while looking through ground-based telescope images. To learn more, his team used data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, the Keck Observatory in Hawaii, and the Dragonfly Telephoto Array in New Mexico. In total, they identified nine rings—eight from Hubble and a ninth from Keck’s instruments.
Professor Pieter van Dokkum, a co-author of the study, explained that these rings only last for a short time after a collision. “This is a rare snapshot of a galaxy in a unique phase,” he said.
But Bullseye isn’t just beautiful—it could help scientists understand the universe better. The rings provide clues about how galaxies evolve and how dark matter is spread throughout space. Dark matter is a mysterious substance that scientists believe makes up most of the matter in the universe, though it remains invisible.
Pasha noted that Bullseye is enormous—about 250,000 light-years across, more than twice the size of our Milky Way galaxy. The team believes Bullseye is in the process of transforming into an even larger type of galaxy called a “giant low surface brightness galaxy.” Before this discovery, no one had seen real evidence of this transformation happening.
Since the rings act like cosmic ripples, they give scientists a way to study dark matter in a way most galaxies don’t allow. “This makes Bullseye an excellent case for learning more about the universe,” Pasha said.
The study was published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters and included researchers from Yale, the University of Toronto, and Swinburne University in Australia.
