NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has zoomed in on one side of a cosmic tug-of-war that will rage between two galaxies for tens of millions of years. Frustratingly, this is one competition in which a clear winner may never emerge, as the two galaxies could well be drawn together to merge into one at the end of this gravitational contest.
The galaxy imaged by Hubble is the spiral galaxy NGC 5427. Along with its opponent, the similarly sized spiral galaxy NGC 5426, the galaxy makes up the pairing Arp 271, located around 130 million light-years from Earth in the constellation of Virgo.
