Hubble and Chandra telescopes have captured an image of a galaxy being destroyed, torn apart by invisible cosmic forces 200 million light-years from us, in the constellation Triangulum Australe. Honestly, my brain just can’t comprehend the scale of this event.
Our spiral-shaped Milky Way galaxy lives in a comparatively quiet backwater region of the universe. This is not the case for galaxies crammed together inside huge clusters. As they zip around within a cluster, gas can be pulled from their disks due to a process called ram pressure stripping. Galaxy ESO 137-001 is one example. The star-city looks like it is “leaking” as it plunges through the Norma galaxy cluster.
