Running Out of Gas

A galaxy that's plunging into the densely packed center of the Coma Cluster, a collection of thousands of galaxies, is having gas and dust stripped away from it in the process. A tail of gas and dust sprouts from the center of D100, the bright spiral at the upper right of this recent Hubble Space Telescope image. The dust forms the dark streaks, while the gas is being compressed to give birth to new stars, including a cluster of 200,000 of them that forms a bright blue dot within the streaks. The galaxy loses its material as it falls through the cluster. It rams into dense clouds of gas and dust between the galaxies. That pushes the galaxy's own supplies of them away from the galaxy's bright disk. That process may eventually leave D100 without enough gas to form more stars. [NASA/ESA/M. Sun (Univ. Alabama)/W. Cramer and J. Kenney (Yale)]