The Hubble Space Telescope has captured an image of a galaxy cluster that looks like a smiley face in the space.
The image taken by NASA's Hubble Telescope of the galaxy cluster SDSS J1038+4849 shows the cluster to be smiling with two glowing yellow eyes and several curved lines forming a face and a smile.
According to NASA, the two eyes are very bright galaxies and the misleading smile lines are actually arcs caused by an effect known as strong gravitational lensing.
Galaxy cluster is a massive structure that consists of anywhere from hundreds to thousands of galaxies bound together by gravity. Galaxy clusters exert such a powerful gravitational pull that they warp the space-time around them and act as cosmic lenses which can magnify, distort and bend the light behind them.
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.
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