Space is filled with weird and wonderful things, ranging from gigantic supermassive black holes to planets where it rains diamonds.
Sometimes, however, we spot things out in the abyss that look strangely familiar to us, such as household objects or animals.
One such discovery includes a strange punctuation mark lurking in the background of a new image from the James Webb Space Telescope.
The Cosmic Question Mark
The strange question mark, imaged by the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. NASA, ESA, CSA, J. DePasquale STScI
Hidden within a picture of the Herbig-Haro 46/47 is a bizarre object that looks exactly like a question mark.
The exact identity of this object remains a mystery, but we know from its redder hue that it’s incredibly far away from the Earth—light is shifted into the red end of the spectrum for objects moving away from us.
Horsehead Nebula
This image shows two different views of the Horsehead Nebula. On the right is a view of the nebula in visible light, taken using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile (eso0202a). The new image on the left shows the nebula in the infrared, using observations from Hubble’s high-resolution Wide Field Camera 3. NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team AURA/STScI; ESO
Another cosmic oddity that looks like something much closer to home is the Horsehead Nebula, which looks like—as you might imagine—a horse’s head.
The Horsehead Nebula is a dark nebula in the constellation Orion, situated around 1,375 light-years from Earth. It was discovered for the first time in 1888, and is a stellar nursery, with stars forming within the thick clouds of dust and gas that comprise the nebula.
Space Skull
This image, taken by Hubble on June 19, 2019, shows two huge galaxies colliding to form the shape of a skull. NASA, ESA, Julianne Dalcanton UWashington), Benjamin F. Williams UWashington, Meredith Durbin (UWashington
A bizarre skull-shaped collision between two galaxies was snapped by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2019, named the Arp-Madore 2026-424 system.
Each
