Here is some more information on their observations:

“On the leading side of the galaxy, all the gas and dust appears to be piled up in one long ridge, or dust front. But you see remarkable, fine scale structure in the dust front,” Kenney explained. “There are head-tail filaments protruding from the dust front. We think these are caused by dense gas clouds becoming separated from lower density gas.”

Cosmic wind can easily push low-density clouds of interstellar gas and dust, but not high-density clouds. As the wind blows, denser gas lumps start to separate from the surrounding lower density gas which gets blown downstream. But apparently, the high and low-density lumps are partially bound together, most likely by magnetic fields linking distant clouds of gas and dust.

Aside from just being cool this is imporant because:

Gas is the raw material for star formation, its removal stops the creation of new stars and planets.

Understanding the movement of this dust will give us better insight to when stars formed or didn’t inside a galaxy.  Just another piece in the galactic puzzle 🙂

And below is a cool related video of the largest obervable galaxy in the universe:

thanks to phys.org for the great info

thanks to NASA for the pic