It may or may not be relavent, but it's definitely worth mentioning.
One of the things that has led me this conclusion is M82.
The Cigar Galaxy.
At about the time I first saw this galaxy I was also in high school biology learning about mitosis and this looked strikingly similar to a splitting eukaryote.
An X-ray image of M82
M82, at a distance of 11 million light years from Earth, is the nearest starburst galaxy. Massive stars are forming and expiring in M82 at a rate ten times higher than in our galaxy. The bright spots in the center of this Chandra X-ray image are supernova remnants and X-ray binaries. These
are some of the brightest such objects known. The luminosity of the X-ray binaries suggests that most contain a black hole. The diffuse X-ray light in the image extends over several thousand light years, and is caused by multimillion degree gas flowing out of M82. A close encounter with a large galaxy, M81, in the last 100 million years is thought to be the cause of the starburst activity.
Now I don't know the numbers NASA ran to come up with this conclusion, so I can't comment directly to this theory. I do think that M81 came out looking rather unscathed for this explanation to be 100% accurate.
All the popular satellites have been pointed at it since those day 18 yrs ago...
The red in this image is thought to be the same compound as you would find in car exhaust and other combustion reactions.
All and all I can't find any evidence to refute my claim that M82 is a galaxy going through mitosis. Although the evidence supporting the claim is equally lacking. I believe it is worth considering the concept.