The Hydra I Galaxy Cluster: Jellyfish Galaxy NGC 3312 | ESO
This image shows a colorful backdrop of stars and galaxies against the black cosmos. There is a large spiral galaxy at the center of the image. The spiral galaxy appears slightly smudged.
This picture shows a snippet of the Hydra I cluster. It contains hundreds of galaxies. Each has its own quirks and history—but today, we focus on the story behind the leaky galaxy NGC 3312. This is the largest spiral galaxy known in the cluster.
The spiral galaxy, right at the center of this image, looks almost smudged across the screen, spilling its contents into the cosmos around it. This is NGC 3312 experiencing ram pressure stripping.
This happens when a galaxy moves through a dense fluid, like the hot gas suspended between galaxies in a cluster. This hot gas drags against the colder gas on the outer shell of the galaxy, ‘pulling’ it off of the galaxy and causing it to leak into the cosmos. This cold gas is the raw material that forms stars, meaning galaxies losing gas this way risk a dwindling stellar population. Affected galaxies—usually those falling into the center of clusters—tend to eventually form long tendrils of gas trailing behind them, leading to their nickname: jellyfish galaxies.
This is just one of the many astronomical processes that make pictures of the Universe so varied and captivating. What other stories are waiting to be told about the hundreds of objects in this image?
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