A new Hubble Space Telescope image reveals a previously unseen ring of gas inside a nearby galaxy.

The galaxy lies 13 million light-years away in the southern constellation Circinus. It is called a type 2 Seyfert galaxy, a class of mostly spiral galaxies that have compact centers and are believed to contain massive black holes.

Seyfert galaxies are themselves part of a larger class of objects called Active Galactic Nuclei or AGN. AGN remove gas from the centers of their galaxies by blowing it out into space at phenomenal speeds.

Magenta-colored streamers near the top of the image are a signature of the gas and dust being expelled out of the galaxy's disk.

Much of the gas in the disk of the Circinus spiral is concentrated in two specific rings -- a larger one 1,300 light-years across, which has already been observed by ground-based telescopes, and a previously unseen inner ring that is 260 light-years wide.

In the Hubble image, the smaller inner ring is located on the inside of the green disk. The larger outer ring extends off the image and is in the same plane that the galaxy's disk rotates. Both rings are home to large amounts of gas and dust, as well as areas of major starburst activity where new stars form rapidly on time scales of 40-150 million years, much shorter than the age of the entire galaxy.

This Hubble image was taken on April 10, 1999 with the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2.

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