OK BA explain how this one happens

http://www.msnbc.com/news/803934.asp?0na=x2338180-

The explanation is on the Hubble Heritage page.

Wow, that's even better than the Cartwheel Galaxy. I've always liked photos of strange galactic shapes. [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_biggrin.gif[/img]

BTW, except for the first sentence, the text of the MSN newsbrief is word-for-word the same as the Hubble Heritage explanation. It appears to be a simple cut-and-paste news release.

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...And that, my liege, is how we know the Earth to be banana-shaped. --Sir Bedevere

I put a mention of this image in my most recent newsletter (Issue 22). The woman who put the image together is an undergrad here at SSU, is on my team and is a friend of mine. [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_wink.gif[/img]

Great pic, y'all. Thanks.

(I now have something to shoot for.)

The Discovery Channel website also delves into this one.
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/afp/20020902/hubble.html

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"As I lay beneath the Southern Cross, the stars tell more than I could" . . . David Meece

I don't doubt it will be on the APOD very soon, with lots of interesting links to follow.

This link has a hi-res .jpg version of the image.
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/wfpc/

And the full-size .tif image can be found here:
http://heritage.stsci.edu/gallery/galindex.html

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...And that, my liege, is how we know the Earth to be banana-shaped. --Sir Bedevere

Hey guys, don't look now, but can you find the ring in the ring?

It has really intrigued some of the profs here at Princeton. Is it internal to the galaxy or another ring behind it? Maybe the image of the galaxy on the second way around a closed topological universe [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_smile.gif[/img]) In any case, it's peculiar enough that someone in the department gave Arp a call. I'll tell you what is discovered if an answer ever comes up.

I saw that too. I wonder though; it may just be a spiral in the background with a star formation ring. There are lots of galaxies like that. The arms may be too faint to see in the image. Remember, the picture isn't data. It's been heavily processed. Since it's a Heritage image the data are probably public. I'll ask my friend tomorrow and see.

Someone gave Arp a call? Care to drop a name? You don't have to, but I'm curious.

It was Bohdan Paczynski who was talking about doing that. It's obviously not a high-priority item right now. More of just side-chatter.

Yup... it's on APOD... and they mention the ring inside the ring as being a coincidental ring galaxy that is farther away.

I wonder if the central stars are spewing out tendrils of "solar wind" that is dark and sparse for 10s of millions of years before it coalesces into stars, causing the ring shape. The ring looks like a lot of arcs, as if the stars are in trajectories that will pull them back to the middle.

This is a quote from one of my profs, Jim Gunn, about the ring within the ring...

Yeah, it's a weird object, no question. I'm not surprised Paczinsky is interested.

The data are public, and can be downloaded from the HST archive. The filters used were pretty wide passband, to minimize exposure time, I'm sure. This object was observed as a Heritage object. In other words, it wasn't some scientist's data, it was observed strictly to make this picture. Since Heritage doesn't get much Hubble time, they used wide bands to soak up as much light as they could in the shortest time. So I am not sure how scientifically useful the data are other than to look at the galaxy's morphology: its shape and structure.

Looking back on this post, I can see I haven't lost the use of the jargon. [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_wink.gif[/img] I could even jargonify this more, but I'll spare everyone.

Definitely a non-physicist thought here, but this picture reminds me of some pics I saw on a recent visit to an astrophysics lab where folks were working on the effects of gravitational lensing. Massive object in the center causing apparently repeating views of objects behind it in a somewhat ringlike pattern.

The galaxy is absolutely gorgeous!

However, I will not put it on my desktop, because my favorite galaxy, NGC1365 holds that desktop spot ad infinitum.

ljbrs [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_biggrin.gif[/img] [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_smile.gif[/img] [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_wink.gif[/img]

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"There is in the universe neither center nor circumference." Giordano Bruno Born 1548. Torched 1600.

NGC1365 is also nice, but my desktop belongs to NGC 4414.

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Any day you wake up on "the right side of the dirt" is a good day.

T. Anderson