Gallery: Space Photos of the Week: The Smiling Cheshire Cat Galaxy
<a href="http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/where-alice-in-wonderland-meets-albert-einstein.html">X-ray: NASA/CXC/UA/J.Irwin et al; Optical: NASA/STScI</a>01SPoW-November27-003b
The “Cheshire Cat” galaxies are so named because of their grinning features, but not all of them are nearby. Some are distant galaxies whose light has been stretched and bent by large amounts of mass contained in the foreground galaxies. This is known as “gravitational lensing” and is one of the key factors of Einstein’s general relativity published 100 years ago this month. This photo from Chandra X-Ray Observatory finds evidence that the Cheshire Cat group are slamming into one another and the left “eye” contains a supermassive black hole.
<a href="http://www.eso.org/public/images/ann15088a/"> ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2. Acknowledgement: Davide De Martin</a>02SPoW-November27-005
This photo shows the positions of the past, present and predicted future appearances of the Refsdal supernova. The circle top left is the position of the supernova as it was in 1995 (though it wasn’t actually observed). The circle bottom right shows the galaxy which lensed the Refsdal Supernova to produce four images — a discovery made in late 2014. The middle circle shows the predicted position of the reappearing supernova in late 2015 or early 2016.
<a href="http://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/springtime-in-the-south-atlantic">NASA/Ocean Biology Processing Group, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center</a>03SPoW-November27-003
The Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite instrument abroad NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite captured these phytoplankton communities between the Falkland Islands to the west and South Georgia Island to the east.
<a href="http://www.eso.org/public/images/eso1546c/"> ESO</a>04SPoW-November27-009
In the very center of this photo is VY Canis Majoris, an incredibly bright red hypergiant star. It’s one of the largest known stars in the Milky Way and has clouds of glowing red hydrogen gas, dust clouds and the bright star cluster around the bright star Tau Canis Majoris towards the upper right.
<a href="http://www.eso.org/public/images/eso1546a/"> ESO</a>05SPoW-November27-006
An upclose shot of VY Canis Majoris, a red hypergiant star. Its mass is almost 40 times the mass of the Sun and 300,000 times more luminous. This upclose view was captured by the SPHERE instrument on the VLT, revealing how the brilliant light of the star illuminates the clouds of material surrounding it. In this photo, the star itself is hidden behind an obscuring disc and the crosses are artifacts due to features in the instrument.
<a href="http://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/hubble-captures-a-galactic-waltz"> ESA/Hubble & NASA</a>06SPoW-November27-008
This galaxy— 2MASX J16270254+4328340—has merged with another galaxy. A fine mist, made of millions of stars, spews from it in long trails. The galaxy is growing old and its star-forming days are coming to an end. The clash caused an eruption of star formation and exhausted the vast majority of the galactic gas, leaving the galaxy sterile and unable to produce new stars. Eventually the stars will redden with age and dim one by one, leaving the galaxy to slowly fade.
<a href="http://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/neowise-identifies-greenhouse-gases-in-comets"> NASA/JPL-Caltech</a>07SPoW-November27-004
This photo is an expanded view of comet C/2006 W3 (Christensen). NASA’s NEOWISE spacecraft observed 163 comets including C/2006 W3 in 2009. Data from the survey are now giving new insights into the dust, comet nucleus sizes, and production rates for difficult-to-observe gases like carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide.
<a href="http://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/jpl/pia18344/dione-before-the-rings">NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute</a>08SPoW-November27-002
This is a photo of Dione, one of Saturn’s 53 named moons. In the background are Saturn’s rings. It was captured during a Cassini flyby that was testing Dione’s gravity field, but Cassini also got some up close photos of the moon’s icy surface.
