English: Ok, not really a bouncy ball, but really a giant galaxy. The two center galaxies are clearly gravitationally bound to one another and are in the process of orbiting and perhaps eventually merging into a single apparent entity.

What really makes this interesting is that one of them, 3C346, has an active nucleus with a jet flinging material away from it at some significant fraction of light speed. Furthermore, the curving shape of the jet needs an explanation. What could it be?

If we could imagine the scene animated over millions of years, it might become clearer. Does the path of the jet trace the motion of the galaxy's nucleus as it orbits and is orbited by its partner? It really does look like a spiral shape seen from such an angle to make part of it appear to have a hard angle.

Well, maybe I am wrong. The one paper ( adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-bib_query?db_key=AST&b... ) I managed to find regarding the shape of the jet explains it as resulting from interactions within the cluster atmosphere. I'm not really in any position to offer a proper disagreement.

Anyway, it's interesting either way.

The color for this image was derived from PanSTARRS data. There is one incredible ACS image in the Hubble archive which is useful for a non-color image and a variety of other bands and spectroscopy are available, but generating a "pretty" picture from that alone didn't quite work out, so I checked on the PanSTARRS image cutout service and went with that. The result is that only the brighter objects in the frame have coloration. This is not an ideal situation, but the object is interesting enough to at least try and get people to look at.

Luminance: ACS/WFC F606W Red: PanSTARRS z Green: PanSTARRS y+r Blue: PanSTARRS g

North is up.