The Hubble image reveals a “jellyfish galaxy” named JW39 that is over 900 million light-years away in the constellation Coma Berenices.

The JW39 galaxy, which is well-known for its tentacle-like appendages and shares a supermassive black hole with the Milky Way, is frequently warped by the gravitational pull of numerous neighboring galaxies.

There is no vacant space between galaxies in the cluster. Instead, it is filled with superheated plasma through which galaxies swim “like swimmers fighting against a current,” NASA officials wrote in a Friday (May 26) image description.

JW39 and its neighbor galaxies experience the intergalactic gas as a headwind, which, when strong enough, overcomes the galaxies’ gravitational influence and cleanses them of their gas and dust, producing tentacle-like structures.

JW39 is one of numerous galaxies in clusters throughout the universe that undergo ram-pressure stripping, a process that diminishes the quantity of gas and dust within galaxies. Without the celestial constituents necessary to produce new stars, galaxies will eventually cease stellar production and become galactic wastelands.

Many new stars are being born in those tentacles.

Such stripping is one of the mechanisms by which galaxies in clusters, such as JW39, reach their apogee of star formation early and cease star formation sooner than their counterparts in the rest of the universe.

Despite the fact that the existence of black holes has not yet been confirmed, current models indicate that such a singular, confined region of high mass cannot be produced by other processes.

Vitral’s team performed numerical simulations to determine whether the mass of 800 suns could be produced by a group of black holes or soon-to-be black holes, such as neutron stars or white dwarfs, and discovered that what Hubble observed is more compact than what the simulations can generate.

“If the object isn’t a single intermediate-mass black hole, it would require an estimated 40 smaller black holes crammed into a space only one-tenth of a light-year across to produce the observed stellar motions,” team members wrote in the same statement. “As a result, they would either merge or be ejected in a game of interstellar pinball.”

The Hubble image shows a “jellyfish galaxy” designated JW39 in Coma Berenices around 900 million light-years distant.

A magnificent Hubble Space Telescope photograph shows a faraway galaxy’s cosmic filaments.

The JW39 galaxy, which is well-known for its tentacle-like appendages and shares a supermassive black hole with the Milky Way, is frequently warped by the gravitational pull of numerous neighboring galaxies.

There is no vacant space between galaxies in the cluster. Instead, it is filled with superheated plasma through which galaxies swim “like swimmers fighting against a current,” NASA officials wrote in a Friday (May 26) image description.

JW39 and its neighbor galaxies experience the intergalactic gas as a headwind, which, when strong enough, overcomes the galaxies’ gravitational influence and cleanses them of their gas and dust, producing tentacle-like structures.

JW39 is one of the numerous galaxies in clusters throughout the universe that undergo ram-pressure stripping, a process that diminishes the quantity of gas and dust within galaxies. Without the celestial constituents necessary to produce new stars, galaxies will eventually cease stellar production and become galactic wastelands.

Such stripping is one of the mechanisms by which galaxies in clusters, such as JW39, reach their apogee of star formation early and cease star formation sooner than their counterparts in the rest of the universe.

Despite the fact that the existence of black holes has not yet been confirmed, current models indicate that such a singular, confined region of high mass cannot be produced by other processes.

Vitral’s team performed numerical simulations to determine whether the mass of 800 suns could be produced by a group of black holes or soon-to-be black holes, such as neutron stars or white dwarfs, and discovered that what Hubble observed is more compact than what the simulations can generate.

“If the object isn’t a single intermediate-mass black hole, it would require an estimated 40 smaller black holes crammed into a space only one-tenth of a light-year across to produce the observed stellar motions,” team members wrote in the same statement. “As a result, they would either merge or be ejected in a game of interstellar pinball.”