No, it’s not an interstellar bull’s eye. This remarkable image captured by Japan The Subaru Telescope on Hawaii’s Mauna Kea, actually shows something much more special: an extremely rare triple-ring galaxy located about 800 million light-years from Earth, officials at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan wrote in a statement. How it was formed remains a cosmic mystery.

Below standard The Hubble sequence Classification method, galaxies usually fall into one of four categories: elliptical, lenticular, spiral, and irregular. Elliptical galaxies appear quite smooth and egg-shaped through a telescope, with an even distribution of stars. Lenticular galaxies they look a bit like flattened ellipses with a bulge in the center – imagine seeing a fried egg from the side. Spiral galaxies like ours Milky waythey have a similar central bulge, but instead of an outer disk, they have swirling stellar “arms”. And irregular galaxies, as their name suggests, do not have a predictable and organized shape.