A series of wispy green objects have been photographed in deep space.

The green filaments are believed to be long tails of gas that are tens of thousands of light-years long.

They are being pulled apart by gravitational forces caused by the long-past mergers of separate galaxies.

The weird shapes are thought to be ephemeral ghosts lit up by quasars that flickered to life and then faded.

These quasars are formed out of disks of glowing, superheated gas encircling supermassive black holes lying at the centre of a host galaxy.

They suck in material and superheat it, expelling energy as a brilliant beam of radiation that shines back out into space.

This radiation has then illuminated these strange green shapes, photographed by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.

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