It’s big. It’s beautiful. It looks a bit like a sparkly, starry, slightly smooshed Eye of Sauron.
It’s the galaxy NGC 4632, and new radio telescope images suggest that it sports a rare “polar ring” — a halo of mostly hydrogen gas tilted about 90 degrees from the plane of the galaxy’s disk.
These spectacular structures, which can also contain dust and stars, are thought to encircle only about 1 in 1,000 galaxies. But now it seems that many more — possibly 30 times as many — could be hiding in plain sight, researchers report in the November Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
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