This article is more than 12 years old

This article is more than 12 years old

Two galaxies swing past each other in a cosmic dance choreographed by gravity, 300m light years from Earth in the constellation of Leo.

This image, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, reveals in unprecedented detail the bright regions of star formation, interstellar gas clouds and prominent dust arms that spiral out from the galaxies' centres.

The larger galaxy on the right is seen nearly face-on, with a giant arm of stars, dust and gas reaching out and around its smaller neighbour, which is viewed edge-on.

The shapes of both galaxies have been distorted by their gravitational interaction with one another.

The pair are known collectively as Arp 87, and are just one celestial coupling among hundreds of interacting and merging galaxies known in the nearby universe.

Arp 87 was first discovered and catalogued by the astronomer Halton Arp in the 1970s, and was described in Arp's Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies.

The Hubble image, a composite of red, blue, green and infra-red exposures, was taken using the telescope's wide field planetary camera 2.

It shows a corkscrewing bridge of material spanning from one galaxy to the other, suggesting stars and gas are being drawn from the larger galaxy into the gravitational pull of the smaller one.

Interacting galaxies are often hosts to the highest levels of star formation found anywhere in the nearby universe.