NASA's Hubble captures two dwarf galaxies heading towards the “big city”

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has spotted two dwarf galaxies that are being drawn in by a cluster of galaxies or a “big city” packed with galaxies, as NASA like to call it.

The pair of dwarf galaxies called Pisces A and Pisces B, are making the ‘move’ from an area in space known as the Local Void -- a stretch of space 150 million light-years across that is notorious for being scarcely occupied with galaxies -- after billions of years of inactivity. 

Now that the pair is slowly being pulled in by the “galactic big city”, it is believed that the  abundance of intergalactic gas will trigger the formation of more stars.

“These Hubble images may be snapshots of what present-day dwarf galaxies may have been like at earlier epochs,” lead researcher Erik Tollerud of the Space Telescope Science Institute said in a statement. 

“Studying these and other similar galaxies can provide further clues to dwarf galaxy formation and evolution,” he added.

As dwarf galaxies are much smaller in size, it is not uncommon for these galaxies to pulled in by larger galaxies. This results in galaxy merger, a process which leads to the formation of one large galaxy.

As a result, dwarf galaxies are considered to be vital to the formation of larger galaxies during the early stages of the universe.