Caught in a galactic twirl

The dance of gravity is a strange one for galaxies, as they both push and pull on each other and completely remould the shape of the gas, dust and billions of stars that make them. Here, the two galaxies NGC 6286 and NGC 6285, collectively known as Arp 293, are in that exact dance. The Hubble Space Telescope was able to watch this waltz from a distance of 250 million light years away, and pictures like this play an important role in understanding the unusual activity of large-scale galactic structures.