Too bad a ring is still too easy to get created naturally. If it would have had the shape of a square, or a dogecoin, that'd get really interesting

< monks, chanting >

Fifth Element!

And Halo…

custom made arrangement of galaxies??

Aliens - custom-made. I didn't want to say man-made!

This can’t be alien-made. That’s 9.2 billion years old. The universe was too young back then to allow life to evolve. Not only that, but for a civilization to reach that kind of technological level it could easily have taken them another billion years.

I don't think we can rule it out.

The current universe conditions have existed for about 12.8 billion years, and while it might have taken 4.5 billion years for vertebrates to evolve on earth, other planets might have taken faster paths to self-awareness.

I figure an "intelligent sludge" could easily have evolved within a billion years of planet formation. Something that wasn't even fully multicellular, but could work together to produce intelligence in a community of loosely connected homogeneous cells. And if that lifeform gained the ability to intelligently manipulate its own DNA (or equivalent), it could bypass the whole next stages of evolution. Or it could go straight for technology.

The oldest stars would have been 4.5 billion years old by then.