Scientists want to know what this distant galaxy ate to make it so weird

A galaxy 55 million light-years away in space spins in two directions at once, and astronomers suspect it ended up that way after swallowing a smaller neighbor.

The Hubble Space Telescope , NASA 's optical light telescope in orbit around Earth, has now photographed the galaxy, called NGC 4698, in sharp detail.

It sits in the constellation Virgo, one of more than 1,000 galaxies that gravity holds together in the Virgo Cluster, the closest big group of galaxies.

Although galaxies can grow on their own, they can also evolve by consuming gas and smaller galaxies it bumps up against.

The two scenarios leave different clues, and NGC 4698 leans toward a galaxy that ate something.

Because only a few known spiral galaxies spin against themselves like this, astronomers want to study NGC 4698 to figure out how it happened.

SEE ALSO: A giant new moon crater is nothing next to its 4-mile bruise Picture a doughnut spinning around your finger.

That is the body of this distant galaxy.

Its bright arms wrap around the outside in a ring and leave the middle open.

The ring turns flat — the way nearly every spiral galaxy revolves — including our own Milky Way .

Now picture another mini doughnut sitting in its hole, standing on its edge and spinning perpendicular to the big one.

That is what's going on in the middle of NGC 4698, except the little doughnut is really more of a dough ball, stretched into an oval and missing its own hole.

The stars packed inside it ride up over the top of the galaxy and down under the bottom.

Hubble's image shows those bulges as a faint glow above and below the dusty plane.