Intergalactic Taffy Pulling

Of all the brilliant objects in the universe that the Hubble Space Telescope has photographed, the one here capturing a slow-motion collision of three galaxies is among the "most arresting" to date. That's according to our geeky friends with the cool jobs at NASA who theorize a small galaxy that may have once looked like our own spiral-shaped Milky Way is now hapless and mangled, "caught in a cosmic blender," its dust lanes stretched and warped by the gravity of neighboring elliptical galaxies.

"Unlike the elliptical galaxies, the spiral is rich in dust and gas for the formation of new stars," NASA said in a statement today. "It is the fate of the spiral galaxy to be pulled like taffy and then swallowed by the pair of elliptical galaxies, which will trigger a firestorm of new stellar creation." NASA added that if any astronomers are on any alien planets in these galaxies, "they will have a ringside seat to seeing a flurry of star birth unfolding over many millions of years to come. Eventually, the elliptical galaxies should merge, creating one single super-galaxy many times larger than our Milky Way."

The trio is part of a tight cluster of 16 galaxies, many of them being dwarf galaxies. The cluster is called the Hickson Compact Group 90 and lies about 100 million light-years away in the direction of the constellation Piscis Austrinus, the Southern Fish.

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Image: NASA, ESA and R. Sharples (University of Durham)

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