A new wider view of two very well-known galaxies has revealed a big surprise: They are connected by faint, starless filaments of hydrogen gas which trace back to a very high-speed intergalactic collision. The smash-up between galaxies M86 and NGC4438 not been suspected before, and may explain why M86, which is visible to the naked eye, is unable to give birth to new stars... During galactic smash-ups stars rarely collide, since there is so much space between them. But gases do slam into gases. The faster the collision, the higher the temperature the gases reach. In the case of M86,...