A mischievous face with a big smile shines light-years away from Earth.

A new photo taken by a NASA space telescope called Chandra shows a group of galaxies nicknamed the "Cheshire Cat" looking oddly like a cosmic smiling face, but this feline, much like the character from Alice in Wonderland, is more than meets the eye.

See also: The universe is smiling at us

The two bright galaxies that represent the cat's eyes are actually part of two separate groups of galaxies heading toward a collision in about 1 billion years, NASA said.

"Astronomers think the Cheshire Cat group will become what is known as a fossil group, defined as a gathering of galaxies that contains one giant elliptical galaxy and other much smaller, fainter ones," NASA said in a statement. "Fossil groups may represent a temporary stage that nearly all galaxy groups pass through at some point in their evolution."

This photo also puts a key part of Einstein's theory of general relativity on display.

Einstein theorized that matter actually "warps" the fabric of space-time, causing light to bend around extremely massive objects. This bending of light can allow scientists to observe very distant objects more easily through a process called gravitational lensing, NASA said.

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For example, the light from a distant galaxy might encounter a huge cluster of galaxies on its way to Earth. When the light from the faraway galaxy comes upon that cluster, the mass of the group of the galaxies causes the light of the more distant object to bend around it, effectively magnifying and distorting the light of the far galaxy from Earth's perspective.

This bending of light happens because massive objects like planets, black holes, galaxies and other bodies can warp space-time's fabric like a bowling ball dimpling a sheet on a mattress.

In the case of the Cheshire Cat galaxies, some of the distant galaxies are being gravitationally lensed by the mass within two groups of galaxies that make up the cat's eyes and nose, NASA said.

"The multiple arcs of the circular 'face' arise from gravitational lensing of four different background galaxies well behind the 'eye' galaxies," NASA said.