When worlds collide: Stunning picture of 'star wars' in Centauras A

Blink and you might miss it - this incredible image of Centauras A, the closest ‘radio galaxy’ to Earth, shows one system that lies within it ingesting another.

Experts now think Centaurus A was formed by a merger between two separate galaxies – and this new image goes a long way to backing that theory, it is claimed. The dusty band at the centre of the newly-released image is thought to be the mangled remains of a spiral galaxy being ripped apart by a giant elliptical galaxy.

And the phenomenon is set to be a feature of our skies for a while yet as it will take another couple of hundred million years for the stricken system to fully disappear.

Centaurus A, which lies around 12 million light-years away from Earth, has a central black hole with a mass of about 100 million times that of the Sun. Astronomers believe that this vast black hole produces the system’s abnormally strong radio frequencies, as well as its bright nucleus and jet features.

The European Southern Observatory’s telescope in Chile captured the galaxy with an exposure time of more than 50 hours. The images reveal stunning details of the distant system which has been extensively studied.

“It is of interest because it is the closest radio galaxy to us, which makes it the easiest to study,” European Southern Observatory spokesman Richard Hook told Yahoo! News. “It has got this strange band of dust around the centre which is one galaxy getting sucked into another.

“This image has a very long exposure which means it shows very faint structure,” he added. “It is one of the best pictures which have been taken of the system”.

Centaurus A is so called because it was the first major source of radio waves discovered in the constellation of Centaurus back in the 1950s. It was first documented by British astronomer James Dunlop at the Parramatta observatory in Australia on 4 August 1826.