At the center of this stunning image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope is a magnificent trio of galaxies merging in the constellation Volopas. These three galaxies are on a collision course and will eventually merge into a larger galaxy, disrupting each other’s spiral structure through mutual gravitational interaction in the process. An unrelated foreground galaxy appears to float calmly through the collision zone, while blurred shapes of much more distant galaxies can be seen in the background.

Known to astronomers as SDSSCGB 10189, this colliding trio is a relatively rare combination of three massive star-forming galaxies located just 50,000 light-years apart. While this may seem like a safe distance, it makes them extremely close neighbors for galaxies! Our own galactic neighbors are much further away; Andromeda, the largest galaxy closest to the Milky Way, is 2.5 million light-years from Earth.

This observation was designed to help astronomers understand the origins of the largest and most massive galaxies in the universe. These galactic giants are called Brightest Cluster Galaxies (BCGs) and, as the name suggests, are described as the brightest galaxies in any galaxy cluster. Astronomers suspect that BCGs are formed from the merger of large, gas-rich galaxies like this image. Hoping to shed light on the formation of the universe’s largest galaxies, they turned to Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) and Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) to closely study this trio of galaxies.