It’s big. It’s beautiful. It looks a bit like a sparkly, starry, slightly smooshed Eye of Sauron.
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.
“The implication would be that there are tons of these things out there, masquerading as normal galaxies,” says astronomer Ronald Buta of the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, who wasn’t involved in the new study.
Astronomers are still puzzling out how any galaxies have polar rings at all. But they’re thought to form as galaxies grow, either by colliding with other galaxies or by gobbling up gas.
2023-09-27 07:00:00
Source from www.sciencenews.org
