Hubble telescope spots space 'smiley'

(MENAFN - Gulf Times) The Hubble space telescope has spotted what resembles a "smiley" in deep space.

An image published by the US space agency Nasa and its European counterpart ESA, operators of the low-Earth-orbit telescope, shows "two orange eyes and a white button nose" along with arcs of light that look like a smile and partial contours of a face.

According to the space agencies, the "eyes" of the happy face are very bright galaxies in a galaxy cluster known as SDSS J10384849 about 4.5bn light-years from Earth in the Ursa Major constellation and the arcs are caused by an effect known as strong gravitational lensing.

Explained by Einstein's general theory of relativity and first observed nearly a century ago, gravitational lensing is the bending of light by the gravitational field of a massive object.

In this special case of the phenomenon, a ring is produced because the light source, a gravitational lens and observer are aligned.

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Hubble telescope spots space 'smiley'