The James Webb Space Telescope has discovered the most distant ring galaxy ever observed. The galaxy, designated GS18660, is seen as it appeared just 2.1 billion years after the Big Bang, at a redshift of 3.08, beating the previous record for a collisional ring galaxy at a redshift of about 2.2.

Ring galaxies are rare, making up roughly 0.01 percent of nearby galaxies. They form when a smaller companion galaxy plunges straight through the disc of a larger one, sending a ripple of newborn stars outward like a stone dropped in a pond. In GS18660 the ring is clumpy and glowing with young stars that older Hubble images could not clearly resolve.

The team, led by Michele Perna of the Spanish Astrobiology Center, first picked GS18660 for observation because it looked stretched in Hubble images. Webb's NIRSpec instrument, working as part of the GA-NIFS survey, revealed the ring and a companion galaxy nearby. From the companion's speed and distance, the researchers estimate the collision happened just 17 to 42 million years before the light we see left the galaxy.

Between 10 and 20 percent of the stellar mass in the ring formed in the past few tens of millions of years, which fits the idea that the collision and the burst of new stars were caused by the same event. The result was published on September 8, 2026, in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

There is a caveat. A bar inside the galaxy could also produce a ring, so the team calls the collision their preferred scenario rather than proof. Even so, finding a collisional ring this early in cosmic history tells astronomers that galaxy collisions were already shaping galaxies when the universe was only about 15 percent of its current age.