Long Trail of Clumpy Stars Follows Galaxy Interactions
When galaxies go bump in the night, they cook up new generations of stars that might otherwise have never been born. These close encounters between galaxies cause a gravitational tug-of-war, and gas and dust are drawn out into large streamers. The Hubble Space Telescope's vision is so sharp that it can see clusters of newborn stars strung along these tidal tails. They form when knots of gas gravitationally collapse to create about 1 million newborn stars per cluster. These "string of pearls" features are probably more common in the early universe when galaxies collided more frequently.
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