文章掠影：
虽然它们是宇宙中最大和最空旷的物体，星系们还是会在夜空里撞在一起。哈勃太空望远镜拍摄了很多对撞在一起的星系。如同雪花，没有哪两次撞击看上去是完全一样的。这张照片是迄今为止最为引人注目的星系撞击的图像之一。
英文原文：
Though they are the largest and most widely scattered objects in the universe, galaxies do go bump in the night. The Hubble Space Telescope has photographed many pairs of galaxies colliding. Like snowflakes, no two examples look exactly alike. This is one of the most arresting galaxy smash-up images to date.
At first glance, it looks as if a smaller galaxy has been caught in a tug-of-war between a Sumo-wrestler pair of elliptical galaxies. The hapless, mangled galaxy may have once looked more like our Milky Way, a pinwheel-shaped galaxy. Now that it’s caught in a cosmic blender, its dust lanes are being stretched and warped by the tug of gravity. Unlike the elliptical galaxies, the spiral is rich in dust and gas for the formation of new stars. It is the fate of the spiral galaxy to be pulled like taffy and then swallowed by the pair of elliptical galaxies, which will trigger a firestorm of new stellar creation.
If there are astronomers on any planets in this galaxy group, they will have a ringside seat to seeing a flurry of star birth unfolding over many millions of years to come. Eventually, the elliptical galaxies should merge, creating one single super-galaxy many times larger than our Milky Way. This trio is part of a tight cluster of 16 galaxies, many of them being dwarf galaxies. This particular galaxy cluster is called the Hickson Compact Group 90 and lies about 100 million light-years away in the direction of the constellation Piscis Austrinus, the Southern Fish.
参考译文：
虽然它们是宇宙中最大和最空旷的物体，星系们还是会在夜空里撞在一起。哈勃太空望远镜拍摄了很多对撞在一起的星系。如同雪花，没有哪两次撞击看上去是完全一样的。这张照片是迄今为止最为引人注目的星系撞击的图像之一。
乍一看，这一景象好像是一个小星系置身于一对重量级椭圆星系的拔河比赛中。这个不走运被撕扯的小星系可能曾经就像我们的银河系，形似风车。现在它被一个宇宙绞碎机抓住了，它的尘埃带在重力的拖拉之下正在被拉长和扭曲。与椭圆型星系不同，漩涡型星系含有丰富的尘埃和气体，这些都是形成新的恒星的原料。这个漩涡星系将不可避免的被像太妃糖一样拉长，最后被那一对椭圆星系吞掉，而这将触发一场恒星诞生烈火风暴。
如果有天文学家身处这个星系群中的任何一个行星上，他们将坐在头排看席上目睹一场星辰诞生的风暴正在上演，而这场风暴将持续数千年。最终，椭圆星系将融合，创造出一个比我们银河系大很多倍的超级星系。这三个星系是一个由16个星系组成的紧密星系团的一部分，这些星系中有很多都是矮星系。这个特别的星系团被称为Hickson 紧密星系团90，位于南鱼座，距我们1亿光年。
责任编辑：sealion1986
