Hoag's Object

A perfect ring of blue stars around a golden ball, with a clear gap between them — and nobody is sure how it got that way! Almost no other galaxy looks anything like it.

🚀 Travel there

Hoag's Object — Drawn, not photographed.

What it is

Near-perfect ring galaxy of unclear origin, a ring of blue stars around a separate yellow core.

Ring galaxy: A galaxy shot clean through the middle by another. Every kind of thing there is →

Can you see it?

No. No telescope on Earth will show you this one; it is here to be understood, not seen. It is here because it is worth knowing about — and because leaving it out would make the sky look emptier than it is.

Worth knowing about Hoag's Object

On that same scale, Hoag's Object would be about 600 kilometers away. Light takes 600.0 million years to get here from Hoag's Object, so what you are looking at is Hoag's Object as it was 600.0 million years ago.

What it is made of: A near-perfect ring galaxy — a smooth, glowing ring of young blue stars circling an older, separate yellow core, with a gap between them.
What makes it worth knowing: Nobody is fully certain how it formed; it lacks the usual signs of a collision like the Cartwheel Galaxy's ring.
Its name and its story: Discovered 1950 by astronomer Arthur Hoag, who wasn't sure at first if he'd found a galaxy or a planetary nebula.

How did anyone measure the Earth in the first place?

The numbers