Plowing through its home in the Norma Cluster near the centre of the Great Attractor, galaxy ESO 137-001 leaves streams of lost stars and a bluish mist in its wake as imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope and the Chandra X-Ray Observatory.
The blue glow is actually made up of hot young stars and huge streams of gas being torn away from the galaxy in a process known as ram pressure stripping, a drag-like force acting on an object moving through a fluid. In this case, the fluid is the superheated gas the galaxy is plowing through in the Norma Cluster near the center of the Great Attractor, a region of space where concentrated gravity is pulling entire galaxy clusters toward it. The Milky Way and the Local Group of galaxies are all headed in that direction. This image of ESO 137-001 was captured in 2014.
The video below first shows the the galaxy as seen by Hubble alone and then with the addition of observations by the Chandra X-ray Observatory:
