Galaxies Collide, Produce Superheated Gas Cloud

The enormous swirl in this image is a spiral galaxy that goes by the name of NGC 1232. It appears to be spinning along, minding its own business. But X-ray images allowed astronomer Gordon Garmire to see a strange glow spread across its middle---the purple in the photo above. He knew, then, that something fishy was going on. Now, in a recently published paper, Garmire proposes that the purple haze is a superheated gas cloud that formed when the spiral galaxy collided with---and consumed--