What are these ... blobs, and what are they doing? Here are some of your guesses:
“It reminds me of a meteorologic picture of two tropical storms or hurricanes.”
“Two islands with storms and an underwater volcano in the middle.”
“An image of two volcanic islands, with a boat traveling between them?”
“Two volcanoes or islands and a meteor shooting between the two?”
“It looks like a satellite image (the colours representing some scale, like for temperature, chlorophyll count, etc.); if so, it's probably one of a weather pattern on the ocean.”
“A thermal image of bacteria undergoing bacterial conjugation? Or a cell undergoing mitosis?”
“An infrared image of a star supernova-ing?”
“Could it be mutual annihilation of two subatomic particles?”
“Dividing cells? Heat signatures of twin stars? Two space heaters in a cold room? Random color and shape combination?”
“When all else fails, guess 'modern art.'”
So What Is It?
Three of you correctly identified it (or were darn close :) Congratulations!
fiddlehead: “I think its a radio image of those shock lobe things in outer space, you know when a star collapses and it sends out jet streams, which then hit the outside of the extrastellar medium and into outer space, causing the gas in the jets to spread out, which is what you see here.”
An anonymous visitor: “This seems to be an image in radio-wavelength of a quasar and the two jets of matter being expelled from it.”
chocoholic13: “I believe it to be a pulsar. The small dot between the flares is the neutron star, and the flares are the superheated gas jets.”
Here's a (slightly edited) description from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO):
This is a false-color image of the hyperluminous radio galaxy Cygnus A, a galaxy some 600 million light-years away. Red shows regions with the brightest radio emission, while blue shows regions of fainter emission. Cygnus A was the first hyper-active galaxy discovered, and it remains by far the closest of the hyperluminous radio galaxies. As such, Cygnus A has played a fundamental role in the study of virtually all aspects of extreme activity in galaxies.
Radio galaxies emit radio waves from their central core. The energy to produce these emissions is generated by a supermassive black hole, which sends out jets of high-energy particles many millions of light-years into intergalactic space. These particles emit radio waves, which we can use to trace the jets and determine how much energy they contain.
Many radio galaxies are Double Radio Sources Associated with Galactic Nuclei (DRAGNs), which are large-scale double radio sources produced by jets that are launched by processes in active galactic nuclei. Learn about DRAGNs here.
Further Reading
Image courtesy of NRAO/AUI. Investigators: R. Perley, C. Carilli & J. Dreher.