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SALT LAKE CITY — A friendly face was spotted far from Earth.
The galaxy cluster called SDSS J1038+4849 appears to be smiling in an image captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. A contestant named Judy Schmidt submitted a version of the image to the Hubble’s Hidden Treasures image processing competition.
“You can make out its two orange eyes and white button nose,” NASA wrote. “In the case of this ‘happy face,’ the two eyes are very bright galaxies and the misleading smile lines are actually arcs caused by an effect known as strong gravitational lensing.”
Einstein’s theory of general relativity explains how galaxy clusters “act as cosmic lenses which can magnify, distort and bend the light behind them” because of their powerful gravitational pull, according to NASA.
“In this special case of gravitational lensing, a ring — known as an Einstein Ring — is produced from this bending of light, a consequence of the exact and symmetrical alignment of the source, lens and observer and resulting in the ring-like structure we see here,” NASA explained.
Tutorials on how to search Hubble’s archives for treasures can be found online.
