Moving at high speed, the shock wave swept up and compressed gas and dust, creating a Starburst region around the galaxy's center portion that went unscathed as it expanded outwards.

Alternatively, a model based on the gravitational Jeans instability of both axisymmetric (radial) and nonaxisymmetric (spiral) small-amplitude gravity perturbations allows an association between growing clumps of matter and the gravitationally unstable axisymmetric and nonaxisymmetric waves which take on the appearance of a ring and spokes.

Due to the presence of the HI tail, it is widely believed that G3 is the "bullet" galaxy that plunged through the disk of the cartwheel, creating its current shape, not G1 or G2.

This hypothesis makes sense given the size and predicted age of the current structure (~300 million years old as mentioned before).

Considering how close G1 and G2 are to the Cartwheel still, it is much more widely believed that the roughly 88 kpc (~287,000 light years) distant G3 is the intruding galaxy.

HI tail mapping is extremely useful in determining “culprit” galaxies in similar cases where the solution is relatively unclear.

[citation needed] The existing structure of the cartwheel is expected to disintegrate over the next few hundred million years as the remaining gas, dust and stars that haven’t escaped the galaxy begin to infall back towards the center.

The Cartwheel contains an exceptionally large number of these black hole binary X-ray sources, because many massive stars formed in the ring.