Everything in space is heading somewhere. Even galaxies trudge along -- giant packages of stars moving in unison toward unknown places. Or, sometimes, toward other galaxies.

When two galaxies collide, the collective gravity of all the stars and other matter in each cause a colossal interaction that forces the creation of new stars.

A newly released Hubble telescope image shows just such an interaction. A large spiral galaxy, at left, is stripped into an odd shape while its central area hangs together. The wispy edges of the galaxy are pulled across space toward a smaller passing galaxy, only partly visible in the lower right of the picture.

When galaxies slam into each other, their individual stars almost never collide. The physical size of each star is tiny compared to the typical distance between them, making the chance of physical encounter relatively small.

(In our own Milky Way galaxy, the space between our Sun and our nearest stellar neighbor, Proxima Centauri, is a vast 4.3 light-years.)

But things can be different for the stuff between the stars, where interstellar clouds of gas and dust lurk. High-speed collisions between the clouds can create areas of extreme pressure, smashing matter into dense packages that trigger gravitational collapse.

The hot blue stars in the image are evidence of this textbook-style star formation.

The picture, released November 2, was created by the Hubble Heritage Team using data taken with Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 in 1996.

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