NASA recently pointed the powerful lense of Hubble toward ESO 381-12: a small galaxy located approximately 270 million light-years from Earth toward the Centaurus constellation.
This lovely galaxy—a lenticular by design—certainly resembles a flower that recently bloomed. The ‘petals’, which are actually shells, are rather uncommon in lenticular galaxies; astronomers aren’t entirely sure how they formed in the first place.
The most accepted answer suggests that ESO 381-12 and one of its neighbors—PGC 42871, most likely—interacted sometime in the recent past, “sending shock waves through its structure much like ripples in a pond.”
Also pictured faintly in the background are numerous distant galaxies