Space Effect Called Strong Gravitational Lensing Leads To Cluster Similar To A Smiley Face

The Hubble Space Telescope, a space telescope launched in the 90s and a collaboration between National Aeronautic and Space Administration and the European Space agency, captured an image of a smiley in space. The image was captured in SDSS J1038+4849, a galaxy cluster, which was studied with the help of the Wide Field Camera 3 and Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 of the Hubble Space Telescope.

The smiley face was spotted by Judy Schmidt, a contestant of Hubble's Hidden Treasures image processing competition. Schmidt submitted a version of the picture for the competition, a contest in which the participants have to find observations and process them with the use of professional astronomical processing software.

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, the tendency of humans to find faces in objects was called pareidolia which is basically a neurological phenomenon. The cause for the phenomenon was not known but it was assumed to be because of an evolutionary quirk, which was the ability of humans to adapt to being good at recognising human faces, even if it was something new to them.

NASA said that the smiley face, with two orange eyes and a white button nose, were bright galaxies. It explained that the smile was an effect that is known as gravitational lensing, which is a distribution of matter between a source and the observer during its travel towards the observer.

The organisation, on its website, went on to say that galaxy clusters exerted a gravitational pull, which was powerful in nature, that had the ability to warp space-time as well as the light that came from behind it. It said that this gravitational pull caused the smile to appear in space.

The ring that made up the "smiley face" was called Einstein Ring, which is basically the deformity of light from a source like a galaxy into a ring. This view was produced from a warmed galactic cluster. The two orange eyes, inside the ring, was said to complete the illusion.

This is not the first smiley face that has been spotted in space. The other times include one in the Mars Galle Crater in 1999 and another on the planet Mercury in 2012.

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