Burçin Mutlu Pakdil, a 2009 graduate of the Bilkent University Department of Physics and a Ph.D. candidate at the Minnesota Institute for Astrophysics, is among the scientists at the University of Minnesota Duluth and the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences who have discovered a new, ultra-rare type of galaxy. Ms. Mutlu Pakdil is the lead author of a paper on this work, which was recently published online in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stw3107).
The galaxy discovered by the researchers, PGC 1000714, is approximately 359 million light-years from Earth and does not look quite like anything astronomers have observed before. The scientists’ research has provided an initial description of a well-defined, elliptical-like core surrounded by two circular rings. The galaxy appears to belong to a class of rarely observed, Hoag-type galaxies.
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