Gallery: Space Photos of the Week: This Wolf Galaxy Is a Real Lone ... Um, Wolf
<a href="http://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2016/hubble-looks-into-a-cosmic-kaleidoscope">NASA</a>01SPoW-Mar20-26-11.jpg
At first glance, this cosmic kaleidoscope of purple, blue and pink offers a strikingly beautiful — and serene — snapshot of the cosmos. However, this multi-colored haze actually marks the site of two colliding galaxy clusters, forming a single object known as MACS J0416.1-2403.
<a href="http://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/mars-gravity-map">MIT/UMBC-CRESST/GSFC</a>02SPoW-Mar20-26-04.jpg
A Martian gravity map showing the Tharsis volcanoes and surrounding flexure. The white areas in the center are higher-gravity regions produced by the massive Tharsis volcanoes, and the surrounding blue areas are lower-gravity regions that may be cracks in the crust (lithosphere).
<a href="http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1610/?lang">ESO</a>03SPoW-Mar20-26-01.jpg
This scene shows a lonely galaxy known as Wolf-Lundmark-Melotte, or WLM for short. Although considered part of our Local Group of dozens of galaxies, WLM stands alone at the group’s outer edges as one of its most remote members. In fact, the galaxy is so small and secluded that it may never have interacted with any other Local Group galaxy — or perhaps even any other galaxy in the history of the Universe.
<a href="http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/solar-storms-ignite-xray-northern-lights-on-jupiter.html"> X-ray: NASA/CXC/UCL/W.Dunn et al, Optical: NASA/STScI</a>04SPoW-Mar20-26-03.jpg
Solar storms are triggering X-ray auroras on Jupiter that are about eight times brighter than normal over a large area of the planet and hundreds of times more energetic than Earth’s "northern lights," according to a new study using data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. This result is the first time that Jupiter's auroras have been studied in X-ray light when a giant solar storm arrived at the planet.
<a href="https://www.eso.org/public/images/potw1612a/">ESO</a>05SPoW-Mar20-26-09.jpg
The dark patch snaking across this spectacular image of a field of stars in the constellation of Ophiuchus (The Serpent-bearer) is not quite what it appears to be. Although it looks as if there are no stars here, they are hidden behind this dense cloud of dust that blocks out their light.
<a href="http://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/alluvial-fans-in-saheki-crater-mars">NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona</a>06SPoW-Mar20-26-10.jpg
Alluvial fans are gently-sloping wedges of sediments deposited by flowing water. Some of the best-preserved alluvial fans on Mars are in Saheki Crater, an area that has been imaged many times previously. This observation, captured by the HiRISE camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, covers two impact craters that expose the stratigraphy of the fans. It will be used to measure the depth of the fan and describe its depositional history, as well as closer view of some of these layers.
