Image: Hubble observes jellyfish galaxy JO206

The jellyfish galaxy JO206 trails throughout this picture from the NASA/ESA Hubble Area Telescope, showcasing a colourful star-forming disk surrounded by a pale, luminous cloud of dust. A handful of foreground vivid stars with crisscross diffraction spikes stands out towards an inky black backdrop on the backside of the picture. JO206 lies over 700 million light-years from Earth within the constellation Aquarius.

Jellyfish galaxies are so-called due to their resemblance to their aquatic namesakes. Within the backside proper of this picture, lengthy tendrils of vivid star formation path the disk of JO206, simply as jellyfish path tentacles behind them.

The tendrils of jellyfish galaxies are shaped by the interplay between galaxies and the intra-cluster medium, a tenuous superheated plasma that pervades galaxy clusters. As galaxies transfer via galaxy clusters, they ram into the intracluster medium, which strips fuel from the galaxies and attracts it into the lengthy tendrils of star formation.

The tentacles of jellyfish galaxies give astronomers a novel alternative to check star formation beneath excessive situations, removed from the affect of the galaxy’s foremost disk. Surprisingly, Hubble revealed that there aren’t any placing variations between star formation within the disks of jellyfish galaxies and star formation of their tentacles, which suggests the surroundings of newly shaped stars has solely a minor affect on their formation.