文章掠影：
　　雖然它們是宇宙中最大和最空曠的物體，星系們還是會在夜空里撞在一起。哈勃太空望遠(yuǎn)鏡拍攝了很多對撞在一起的星系。如同雪花，沒有哪兩次撞擊看上去是完全一樣的。這張照片是迄今為止最為引人注目的星系撞擊的圖像之一。
　　英文原文：
　　Though they are the largest and most widely scattered objects in the universe, galaxies do go bump in the night. The Hubble Space Telescope has photographed many pairs of galaxies colliding. Like snowflakes, no two examples look exactly alike. This is one of the most arresting galaxy smash-up images to date.
　　At first glance, it looks as if a smaller galaxy has been caught in a tug-of-war between a Sumo-wrestler pair of elliptical galaxies. The hapless, mangled galaxy may have once looked more like our Milky Way, a pinwheel-shaped galaxy. Now that it’s caught in a cosmic blender, its dust lanes are being stretched and warped by the tug of gravity. Unlike the elliptical galaxies, the spiral is rich in dust and gas for the formation of new stars. It is the fate of the spiral galaxy to be pulled like taffy and then swallowed by the pair of elliptical galaxies, which will trigger a firestorm of new stellar creation.
　　If there are astronomers on any planets in this galaxy group, they will have a ringside seat to seeing a flurry of star birth unfolding over many millions of years to come. Eventually, the elliptical galaxies should merge, creating one single super-galaxy many times larger than our Milky Way. This trio is part of a tight cluster of 16 galaxies, many of them being dwarf galaxies. This particular galaxy cluster is called the Hickson Compact Group 90 and lies about 100 million light-years away in the direction of the constellation Piscis Austrinus, the Southern Fish.
　　參考譯文：
　　雖然它們是宇宙中最大和最空曠的物體，星系們還是會在夜空里撞在一起。哈勃太空望遠(yuǎn)鏡拍攝了很多對撞在一起的星系。如同雪花，沒有哪兩次撞擊看上去是完全一樣的。這張照片是迄今為止最為引人注目的星系撞擊的圖像之一。
　　乍一看，這一景象好像是一個小星系置身于一對重量級橢圓星系的拔河比賽中。這個不走運(yùn)被撕扯的小星系可能曾經(jīng)就像我們的銀河系，形似風(fēng)車�，F(xiàn)在它被一個宇宙絞碎機(jī)抓住了，它的塵埃帶在重力的拖拉之下正在被拉長和扭曲。與橢圓型星系不同，漩渦型星系含有豐富的塵埃和氣體，這些都是形成新的恒星的原料。這個漩渦星系將不可避免的被像太妃糖一樣拉長，最后被那一對橢圓星系吞掉，而這將觸發(fā)一場恒星誕生烈火風(fēng)暴。
　　如果有天文學(xué)家身處這個星系群中的任何一個行星上，他們將坐在頭排看席上目睹一場星辰誕生的風(fēng)暴正在上演，而這場風(fēng)暴將持續(xù)數(shù)千年。最終，橢圓星系將融合，創(chuàng)造出一個比我們銀河系大很多倍的超級星系。這三個星系是一個由16個星系組成的緊密星系團(tuán)的一部分，這些星系中有很多都是矮星系。這個特別的星系團(tuán)被稱為Hickson 緊密星系團(tuán)90，位于南魚座，距我們1億光年。