Hubble snaps image of warped galaxy caught in a cosmic tug-of-war

Astronomers find peculiar-looking things in the cosmos all the time, even to the point where a collection of the most strange wonders of the cosmos is compiled into a book for viewing pleasure.

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The Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies is a catalog by Halton Arp, and it's comprised of a collection of all of the strangest galaxies found. The Atlas was assembled in the early 1960s, and since then, astronomers have been finding more and more of these weird and wonderful galaxies. Our window to the universe, or more commonly named the Hubble Space Telescope, has been snapping images of these galaxies for the past 31 years.

Above is an image that was taken by Hubble, and it's of the galaxy Arp 195. As you can see, the galaxy is all warped and distorted, but why? Arp 195 is caught, literally, in a cosmic game of gravitational tug-of-war. Arp 195 isn't a single galaxy - it's actually a trio of galaxies all slowly colliding with each other. This slow collision and the gravity from each of the galaxies is causing what would be normal-looking spiral galaxies to become distorted.

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