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| May 19 - May 25 Our picks of the week's best pictures
SPACE SPIRAL
This image, taken by the European Southern Observatory's UT1 VLT (Very Large Telescope) shows a 23 September, 1996 image of Spiral Galaxy NGC 1232. The galaxy is studied for what is visible and also for the invisible. The visible is dominated by millions of bright stars and dark dust, caught up in a gravitational swirl of spiral arms rotating about the center. Less visible, but detectable, are billions of dim normal stars and vast tracts of interstellar gas, together wielding such high mass that they dominate the dynamics of the inner galaxy. Invisible are even greater amounts of matter in a form we don't yet know - pervasive dark matter needed to explain the motions of the visible in the outer galaxy. 
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