Located 350 million light-years away, two neighbor galaxies are slowly being brought together by gravitational forces.
The Hubble Space Telescope captured the pair’s beautiful cosmic dance in a recent photo of the spiral galaxies, known as Arp 256.
One of the most stunning aspects of the image are the swaths of blue on the outer edges of both galaxies. Those are “stellar nurseries,” collections of gas and dust in the process of becoming new stars. Stellar nurseries are set off by intense gravitational forces, like the massive forces of two galaxies slowly merging.
