The Cosmos with ESO 137-001
Swimming through a group of galaxies more than 200 million light-years away from Earth is the so-called “jellyfish” galaxy named ESO 137-001. This celestial jellyfish is a spiral galaxy much like the Milky Way, but it has long “tentacles” of hot gas streaming away from the galactic disk. Scientists aren’t sure how the gas is being stripped away, but NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope may be able to shed some light on the origin of those tentacles by studying them in unprecedented detail after its planned launch in 2021. This view combines visible-light imagery from the Hubble Space Telescope and X-ray data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory.