Astronomers have discovered a colossal bridge of near-invisible gas — spanning around twice the width of the entire Milky Way — connecting a pair of distant dwarf galaxies. The adjoined entities also share a record-breaking galactic tail, which is more than 15 times longer than our galaxy is wide.
The dwarf galaxy duo, NGC 4532 and DDO 137, is located approximately 53 million light-years from Earth, right on the edge of the Virgo cluster of more than 1,000 galaxies. The pair is similar to the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) and Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) — adjacent dwarf galaxies that closely orbit the Milky Way — but they are not bound to any single entity. Instead, they appear to be slowly falling into the Virgo cluster.
