Hoag's Object is an unusual ring galaxy in the constellation of Serpens Caput. It is named after Arthur Hoag, who discovered it in 1950 and identified it as either a planetary nebula or a peculiar galaxy. The galaxy has a D<sub>25</sub> isophotal diameter of . The galaxy is estimated to have a mass of 700 billion suns.
The gap separating the two stellar populations may contain some star clusters that are almost too faint to see. Though ring galaxies are rare, another more distant ring galaxy (SDSS J151713.93+213516.8) can be seen through Hoag's Object, between the nucleus and the outer ring of the galaxy, at roughly the one o'clock position in the image shown here.
Noah Brosch and colleagues showed that the luminous ring lies at the inner edge of a much larger neutral hydrogen ring.
A few other galaxies share the primary characteristics of Hoag's Object, including a bright detached ring of stars, but their centers are elongated or barred, and they may exhibit some spiral structure. While none matches Hoag's Object in symmetry, these galaxies are sometimes called Hoag-type galaxies.
History and formation
Even though Hoag's Object was clearly shown on the Palomar Star Survey, it was not included in either the Morphological Catalogue of Galaxies, the Catalogue of Galaxies and Clusters of Galaxies, or the catalogue of galactic planetary nebulae.
Many of the galaxy's details remain mysterious, foremost of which is how it formed. So-called "classic" ring galaxies are generally formed by the collision of a small galaxy with a larger disk-shaped galaxy, producing a density wave in the disk that leads to a characteristic ring-like appearance. Such an event would have happened at least 2–3 billion years ago,
Noah Brosch suggested that Hoag's Object might be a product of an extreme "bar instability" that occurred a few billion years ago in a barred spiral galaxy. Schweizer et al