The James Webb Space Telescope captured a stunning new image that may reveal a small surprise. In the background of the stunning star births, lies a point of light in the form of an English punctuation mark – the question mark, according to Science Alert.
It is not clear what exactly this shape is, but it is relatively far away. Generally speaking, the redder an object appears in a field image, the greater the distance. This is because the accelerating expansion of the universe causes light to stretch as it moves towards us, lengthening it into the redder parts of the spectrum. The two points seem to have almost the same color, which raises the intriguing possibility that they could be two distant galaxies interacting.
This is a phenomenon we see very little in the universe, and gravitational interaction can pull these galaxies into interesting extended shapes that some even resemble other things.
Some of these galaxies look a bit like a bass clef (sort of like the top of a question mark, too). Others look a bit like a rose. While others look like a scary skull. It’s not that stuff, of course, it seems to be a whim of human perception, seeing patterns and meaning in the random arrangements of elements.
