Astronomers have spotted a unique collision of two elliptical galaxies using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. The merging galaxies look like they are playing a tug-of-war with a string of pearls.

The 100,000-light-year long stellar bridge has stumped researchers. The cosmic string is about as long as our Milky Way, nbc news reported. At each end of the necklace is a massive galaxy that is at least three times wider than our own.

The image shows that the string of stars is twisted in the shape of a corkscrew that "winds around the cores of two colliding galaxies."

Galactic mergers occur rarely, but what makes the present image even spectacular is that the two massive galaxies are spewing so much gas and debris that they are forming new infant stars. The young, blue super star clusters are present on the string at a separation of about 3,000 light years.

Astronomers said that they can't explain the origin or the ultimate fate of the stellar object. The find, however, might help researchers understand how superclusters form.

"We were surprised to find this stunning morphology, which must be very short-lived" (perhaps about 10 million years, which is a fraction of the time it takes for galaxies to merge)," said Grant Tremblay of the European Southern Observatory in Garching, Germany.

"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," he added, according to a news release.

The elliptical galaxy couple playing with the string is located inside the dense galaxy cluster SDSS J1531+3414. The cluster is so massive that it warps the images of background galaxies - a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing. The blue arcs in the image are a result of this phenomenon.

According to Tremblay, the beads-on-string morphology of the galaxies is due to the self-clumping behavior of gas. The process is analogous to drops in a falling column of water. Rain and even water from a tap fall as drops and not as a single filament. The process is called Jeans instability. Researchers say that a similar thing is happening at the galaxy cluster SDSS J1531+3414.

"We see the same physics on 100,000-light-year scales that we see in our kitchen sinks and inkjet printers," said Tremblay.

The team is now trying to understand the origin of the cosmic pearl necklace.

The study will be published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. Read an abstract of the paper, here.

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