The Jellyfish Galaxy JO206 shows a colorful star-forming disk surrounded by a pale glowing dust cloud in this image taken by NASA/ESA’s Hubble Space Telescope. A few bright foreground stars with diagonal diffraction spikes stand out against the ink black background at the bottom of the image. JO206 is 700 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Aquarius.

Jellyfish galaxies are named this way because of their similarity to their aquatic names. In the lower right corner of this image, long branches of bright stars are visible behind JO206’s disk, and behind them are the tentacles of a jellyfish.

The branches of jellyfish galaxies are formed as a result of the interaction between the galaxies and the environment inside the cluster, which is the diluted superheated plasma that permeates the galaxy cluster. As galaxies move between galaxy clusters, they collide with the intra-cluster medium, which strips the gas of the galaxies and pulls it into long branches of star formation.

The tentacles of jellyfish galaxies offer astronomers a unique opportunity to study star formation in extreme conditions away from the influence of the galaxy’s main disk. Surprisingly, Hubble found that there was no striking difference between the star formation in the disks of jellyfish galaxies and the star formation in their tentacles;