Hoag's Object is perhaps one of the most mysterious and at the same time most beautiful "objects" in our universe.
The latter is nothing more than a galaxy of unconventional appearance, known as a ring galaxy.
This galaxy, about 600 million light-years away, consists of a nearly perfect ring of hot, blue stars surrounding a yellow nucleus.
The diameter of the inner part of the galaxy is about 17,000 light-years, while the outer ring has an internal diameter of about 75,000 light-years.
The galaxy's total diameter is about 121,000 light-years, which is slightly larger than our own Milky Way!
The space separating the two stellar populations (center and ring) could contain some open clusters, but they are too faint to be observed.
Despite the incredible rarity of this type of galaxy, between the outer ring and the nucleus another galaxy with the same ring characteristics is visible, much more distant, and incredibly overlapping with each other for a rare perspective effect!
It is not known exactly how it formed, although some hypotheses indicate that it was crossed by another, much larger galaxy.
However, there is no sign of it.
It is worth noting that this type of ring galaxies represent less than 0.1% of all known galaxies!