800 million light years from us, the galaxy JW 100 (Photo: ESA/Hubble & NASA, M. Gullieuszik and the GASP team)
Hubble caught a jellyfish.
Well, not quite a jellyfish from the sea, but a galaxy that looks like one.
Located 800 million light-years away in the Pegasus system, the galaxy JW 100 contains streams of gas and stardust that look like the cruising arms of water jellyfish on Earth, and it is a beautiful sight, which has also led astronomers to give it the affectionate name "Jellyfish".
The arms are formed as a result of a process of cosmic "peeling" in which galaxies encounter gas clusters, and their gravity simply "peels" pieces of the cluster under pressure, in thin strips resembling the arms of a jellyfish.
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Next to JW 100 you can see in the upper left corner of the amazing image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, two bright discs of light - this is the core of the galaxy IC 5338, the brightest cluster.
It is an elliptical galaxy with an extended halo, a type of galaxy known as cD.
These are galaxies that grow by "swallowing" smaller galaxies, so it is not uncommon to see ones with a double nucleus, because the process of merging the nuclei takes time.
The bright fringes are clusters of stars.
This observation used Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 and its capabilities, and is part of a series of observations that follow Medusa galaxies, due to the unusual conditions they create for star formation.
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