About 300 million light-years from Earth, deep in the constellation Volans, two spiral galaxies spiraled into each other, leaving a brilliant ring of black holes and neutron stars in their wake.

The cosmic smash-up resulted in a what’s known as a ring galaxy, named AM 0644-741, which was captured in a pair of photos and is now featured in a newly published study in the Astrophysical Journal.

When two galaxies collide, there are really almost no collisions at all. Stars and other large objects are so spread out that they rarely smash into each other during such a merger. But the gravitational effects can jostle and rearrange galaxies in very noticeable ways.

“As soon as I looked at optical images of