Astronomers have released an image of what looks like galactic warfare. In a symphony of X-rays (purple), radio waves (blue) and starlight (red), the composite image shows a jet of energy shooting out of a galaxy and hitting its neighbor to the right before splattering into intergalactic space.
The galaxies, with the collective name 3C321, orbit each other about 20,000 light-years apart in the constellation Serpens. Each is thought to harbor a supermassive black hole at its center, where gravity, pressure and unworldly magnetic fields squeeze matter and energy out into space like toothpaste from a tube.
The astronomers, led by Dan Evans of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., combined data from the Hubble Space Telescope; the Chandra X-Ray Observatory; the Very Large Array radio telescope in Socorro, N.M.; and the Merlin radiotelescope array operated by the Jodrell Bank Observatory in Britain.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/18/science/space/18blac.html?ref=space pictures can be seen here