Like long-distance lovers, two galaxies have established a cosmic connection that stretches across 20,000 light-years of space. A newly released Hubble Space Telescope image shows the pair of spinning lovebirds tethered by a ribbon of gas and dust.

The gas and dust leaves one galaxy, arcs through space, and then wraps around the recipient galaxy (at right) like a sloppy dark ribbon around a shiny bright package.

Galaxies are known to sometimes crash into one another, and passing galaxies are often seen sharing material and being stretched like Silly Putty into odd shapes. But the new Hubble view, in visible light, shows an odd twist on the common theme: Matter is moving from one galaxy to another at a very slow rate.

The ribbon of material, some 500 light-years wide, flows from galaxy NGC 1410, at left, to NGC 1409. In a year, it moves very little mass -- about 2 percent of the mass of our Sun -- across the gulf of space, said the scientists who produced the image.

But the two galaxies are forever connected, destined to become one in another 200 million years or so, after orbiting each other and spiraling ever inward.

The galaxies' centers are currently 23,000 light-years apart, which is slightly less than Earth's distance from the center of the Milky Way. They orbit each other at 670,000 miles (1 million kilometers) per hour.

The whole scene is 300 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Taurus.

The image was taken in October 1999 and released Tuesday, January 9, 2000, at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in San Diego.

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