Outer space may be a really, really big place, but that doesn't mean that celestial bodies won't bump into each other from time to time. In fact, there are cases wherein entire groups of such bodies - galaxies, that is - have been found to do just that. NGC 3256 is the place for one such case.

Various parties including NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), Hubble Heritage and A. Evans brought us the picture you see above.  What you are looking at are filaments of dark dust, tidal tails of stars and a center that contains two distinct nuclei.

While it may be unlikely that the stars present in the two galaxies will collide directly, the gas, dust and ambient magnetic fields do tend to interact with one another. The process, however, appears to be a slow one - it's quite possible that only one galaxy will remain after the collision is complete, but that may take hundreds of millions of years.

NGC 3256 itself spans over a hundred thousand light-years across. It's is part of the Hydra-Centaurus galaxy supercluster, located some 100 million light-years away. With stuff like this happening way out there, you can expect more photos of stuff from the folks at NASA, ESA and Hubble Heritage.