Where Destruction Touches Creation, the Sky Catches Fire In this image, destruction that is also creation is visible as the tidal compression ridge where one galaxy’s disk edge rams the other’s tidal tail and ignites a beaded starburst along the shear wall. The viewer experiences suffocating awe because they can see both sides of this boundary simultaneously — gas stripped and shattered into cold dust on one side and newborn stars igniting like hot wounds on the other — and cannot look away from either.