Smile! NASA captures intergalactic emoticon
The man in the moon is a classic example of pareidolia, but NASA appears to have uncovered a more modern 'face in space'.
For those who don't know, Pareidolia is a rather common phenomenon where people see faces or things out of shapes, like 'holy apparitions'.
The galaxy cluster SDSS J1038+4849 was captured by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and entered into the Hubble's Hidden Treasures competition.
It's believed the smile is caused by distortion known as 'gravitational lensing', a technique in astronomy that is used to study very distant objects.
The lensing is caused by the bending of light by massive galaxies which lie closer to our line of sight, and this lensing is then used to view more distant objects.
Gravitational lensing can amplify the light coming from these distant objects, enabling telescopes like Hubble to see objects that would otherwise be too faint and far away.
"From us sitting here [with our line of sight], a galaxy at a certain distance can act like a lens – like a glass lens – [to show] objects _behind_ it," Professor Steven Tingay, a radio astronomer and Director of Science and Operations at Curtin University said in a previous interview.
"As the light goes from the distant object, it passes through the lens of the galaxy, to us."
