Is the Universe Smiling Back? Hubble Space Telescope Discovers Happy Face in Space

Rio Rose Ribaya Saturday, February 14, 2015

Hubble Space Telescope captures this image that looks like a 'smiley' emoticon. | HUBBLE/ESA/NASA

The images captured by the Hubble Space Telescope have been making a lot people all over the world – from scientists to ordinary people – smile with wonder since it was launched more than two decades ago.

Now the Universe appears to be responding in kind. One particular image of the Universe taken by Hubble appears to be smiling right back at its viewers. Well, at least that's what it seems to look like when we look at it at a certain angle.

A deep space picture showed what seemed to be a pair of shining yellow "eyes" – a bright white nose, smears of curving light, and lines of partial circle surrounding the whole group.

Those figures actually do not exist since in the center of the image is actually a cluster of galaxies like SDSS J1038+4849.

The two orange eyes of the grinning face are actually two distant galaxies, and the peculiar smile was caused by an effect known as strong gravitational lensing, Time magazine explained.

"Galaxy clusters are the most massive structures in the Universe and exert such a powerful gravitational pull that they warp the spacetime around them and act as cosmic lenses which can magnify, distort and bend the light behind them," the European Space Agency explained.

"This phenomenon, crucial to many of Hubble's discoveries, can be explained by Einstein's theory of general relativity," it added in a post published on the Hubble website.

The ESA noted that the smiling face was caused by a special case of gravitational lensing, a ring – known as an Einstein Ring – that is "produced from this bending of light, a consequence of the exact and symmetrical alignment of the source, lens and observer that results in the ring-like structure."

ESA said the image was studied by Hubble's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 and Wide Field Camera 3 as part of a survey of strong lenses.

Hubble has been providing astronomers with the tools to probe these massive galaxies and model their lensing effects, allowing people to peer further into the early Universe than ever before, it added.