450 million light years away are two interacting galaxies. Both spirals, they are caught in each other’s gravitational claws. Already distorted and bound, eventually, to merge into one larger galaxy in a few million years, the view we have of them from Earth is both amazing and lovely… and hey: they’re punctuating their own predicament!

[Click to exclamatenate.]

Looking a lot like an exclamation point, the two galaxies together are called Arp 302 (or VV 340). This image is a combination of pictures from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory (purple) and Hubble (red, green, and blue). The bottom galaxy is a face-on spiral, while the upper one is seen more edge-on, giving the pair their typographical appearance.

They’re pretty nifty even if it weren’t for the funny coincidence of shape. The upper galaxy has a supermassive black hole in its core that’s actively feeding, but is obscured by thick layers of dust — the abundance of dust is clear in the upper picture, where in optical light it blocks the brighter material behind it (and the warped appearance ...