It's intergalactic bling: the Hubble Telescope has captured images of two elliptical galaxies coming together to create a "necklace" of young stars that extends for 100,000 light-years.
The two galaxies are both three times wider than the Milky Way, in a cluster known as SDSS J1531+3414. "We were surprised to find this stunning morphology, which must be very short-lived," Grant Tremblay of the European Southern Observatory said. "We've long known that the 'beads on a string' phenomenon is seen in the arms of spiral galaxies and in tidal bridges between interacting galaxies. However, this particular supercluster arrangement has never been seen before in giant merging elliptical galaxies."
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