In a galaxy far, far away—260 million light-years from Earth to be exact—matter moving just below the speed of light collided after being blasted from a supermassive black hole in what’s known as a black hole jet.  The Hubble Space Telescope caught the intense drama, or the “shock collision,” which you can watch in the video above.

These energetic jets of hot plasma look like “light saber-like” fields that appear to “zoom out of black [holes] at speeds several times the speed of light.” But this superluminal speed is actually an illusion. And while they look pretty awesome from 260 million light years away, we really don’t know that much about these “extragalactic jets.” According to NASA:

They appear to transport energetic plasma in a confined beam from the active nucleus of the host galaxy. The new analysis suggests that shocks produced by collisions within the jet further accelerate particles and brighten the regions of colliding material.

The video of the collision is a compilation of images of the NGC 3862 galaxy taken over a span of 20 years. It’s also one of the rare occasions that a jet has been observed with an optical telescope (astronomers are still unclear why some jets are seen in visible light and others are not).

When you watch the video, you can see a super fast knot collide with a slower moving object. Eileen Meyers, of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), explains: “Something like this has never been seen before in an extragalactic jet..This will allow us a very rare opportunity to see how the energy of the collision is dissipated into radiation.”

Over the next few decades, the rest of the collision will play out for us on Earth. But another milestone of this discovery is that this is the second case where a superluminal motion is observed existing thousands of light-years away from the black hole where the jet originally launched. For astrophysicists, this is exciting because it means that “jets are still very, very close to the speed of light even on distances that start to rival the scale of the host galaxy.” Understanding the energy carried out by jets into their host galaxies helps us understand how the universe ages.