This isn’t a giant rainbow sperm, but instead an energetic burst of gases being spat out from the centre of a galaxy thanks to the immense pressures of stars forming at its core.
The observation of galaxy SDSS J0905+57 has been made by a team of scientists from the University of Hertfordshire, UK. Previously it was thought that such ejections were only made possible by a black hole at the core of a a galaxy, but this research shows that not to be the case.
The jet shown here was moving at a face-melting 3.2 million kilometres per hour, and the gases making it up could form the equivalent of more than one billion suns. That, perhaps unsurprisingly, is enough to mean that star formation in this galaxy is now somewhat hampered. [Nature via New Scientist]