E.T. Ring Home

I found an article in a recent New Scientist about a "soliton galaxy" named, rather prosaically, Hoag's Object. Here's an image from the Hubble Space Telescope. Isn't that gorgeous?

A letter to the latest New Scientist suggests that such a colossal anomalous structure may well be evidence of extraterrestrial stellar engineering. I couldn't help recalling the Seven Suns in Arthur C. Clarke's The City and the Stars:

Six of them were arranged in a slightly flattened ellipse, which, Alvin was sure, was in reality a perfect circle, slightly tilted towards the line of vision. Each star was a different colour; he could pick out red, blue, gold, and green, but the other tints eluded his eye. At the precise centre of the formation was a single white giant -- the brightest star in all the visible sky. The whole group looked exactly like a piece of jewellery; it seemed incredible, and beyond all stretching of the laws of chance, that Nature could ever have contrived so perfect a pattern.
[Arthur C. Clarke, The City and the Stars, Corgi edition (1957), p39.]

I can't help wondering what we might find, if we were able to visit a point directly between the nuclei of Hoag's Object and that other, neighbouring soliton galaxy. It'll probably be a while before we have an answer to that one, though.

Even so, I think we can deduce from Hoag's object that, if extraterrestrials exist, they must be utterly sublime visual artists.

"Perhaps it's a signal, so that any strange ship entering our universe will know where to look for life. Perhaps it marks the centre of galactic administration. Or perhaps -- and somehow I feel that this is the real explanation -- it's simply the greatest of all works of art." [Ibid, p194]