This group of galaxies looks like a smiling Cheshire Cat with X-rays (violet).
But the Cat will stop laughing as its “eyes” will collide in less than a billion years.
The Cheshire Cat is a relatively poor group of galaxies dominated by two luminous elliptical galaxies (the two giant ‘cat’s eyes’) and a smaller round galaxy (the ‘cat’s nose’). The multiple arcs making up the circular ‘cat’s face’ arise from gravitational lensing of four different background galaxies.
The Cheshire Cat’s will however lose its “grin” as a new study says the two “eye” galaxies will slam into one another in a giant galactic collision.
