Stephen's Quintet Galaxies
Four of the five of the Stephen's quintet galaxies toward the Constellation Winged Horse or Pegasus, are locked in a cosmic dance of repeated close encounters over 300 million light years away. The interacting galaxies are NGC 7319, 7318B, 7318A and 7317 (left to right) . they appear to have distorted loops and tails, grown under the influence of disruptive gravitational tides. The mostly blueish galaxy, the large NGC7320 (lower left) in the foreground is about 40 million light years distant and is not part of the interacting group. (Davis K. Thanjan)
Image: NASa, ESA, Hubble, Daniel Nobre.