Space Photos of the Week: A Tale of Two Galaxies

This mesmerizing photo resembles a few familiar things—a fingerprint, perhaps, or the inside of a tree—but it’s actually the rotation of the Large Magellanic Cloud. The LMC, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, is just 1/100th the size of our home galaxy. The European Space Agency’s Gaia telescope—which recently collected data on 1.7 billion stars in and around our galaxy—observed the LMC’s rotation and produced this gorgeous fingerprint of one of the most familiar objects in the night sky.

Gaze into the heart of our galaxy! This sparkling image was taken by the European Southern Observatory’s VISTA (Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy). This instrument has collected data on more stars in the heart of the Milky Way than astronomers have been able to gather, ever. By looking at the infrared spectrum in this part of our galaxy, VISTA allows astronomers to view certain features otherwise blocked out by visible light.

Meet NGC 6231, a star cluster that is of interest to astronomers because it is so young. The consensus is that our Sun took shape in a star cluster similar to this one, so capturing its early activity can help scientists learn how stars are dispersed after they form. NASA’s Chandra observatory also captured NGC 6231 in X-ray light, as you see in the right-hand image.

This might not be immediately recognizable as a Martian landscape, yet this is an overhead look at the Korolev Crater, a feature in the red planet’s northern hemisphere, photographed by the European Space Agency’s ExoMars orbiter. The ExoMars image highlights the marks left behind by the activity in this northern region—including the freezing and melting of ice.

The European Space Agency’s Meteosat Second Generation satellite took this stunning photo of Earth flanked by the moon. MSG, as the satellite is known, takes light reflected off the moon to help scientists calibrate ground-based telescopes.

This may not look like a galaxy, but it is. NGC 2655 is a unique kind of astral body called a lenticular galaxy, falling somewhere between an elliptical and a spiral form. (Our Milky Way is a spiral.) Although it appears mostly as strings of gas and stars with no real shape in this image, NGC 2665 is remarkable in that its core is more luminous than other galaxies—putting it into yet another category of galaxy called a Seyfert galaxy. Scientists believe these bright and strong emissions are a result of a supermassive black hole sucking up matter around it.