The Webb telescope found a massive "ring" galaxy from 12 billion years ago that likely formed after a brutal head-on cosmic car crash.
arXiv · March 13, 2026 · 2603.11575
The Takeaway
Ring-shaped galaxies are rare, and finding one so early in the universe's history is surprising. It suggests that even in the 'chaotic' early universe, galaxies were already smashing directly into each other like billiard balls, creating massive circles of new stars.
From the abstract
Ring galaxies are an uncommon class of galaxies whose morphology is closely related to dynamical processes that govern galaxy evolution. Some ring galaxies, known as "collisional ring galaxies", are thought to form as a consequence of head-on collisions between galaxies, and a number of high-redshift collisional ring galaxies have been discovered and/or studied in the era of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). In this paper, we present HST/ACS, JWST/NIRCam, and JWST/NIRSpec observations of a