The James Webb Space Telescope captured an image of stars forming...but one part of the image has viewers puzzled. An orange formation at the bottom of the image looks just like a question mark.
"The aliens know we've found them and now they're just messing with us," one Redditor commented.
Scientist Macarena Garcia Marin says people often enjoy finding familiar shapes in the sky. "I think this exemplifies the human need for exploration and wonder," she said.
Scientists say the "question mark" in space is probably the result of two or more galaxies merging. Our own Milky Way is the result of such a merger!
ESA study scientist Nora Luetzgendorf says that while it's too far away to say for sure, the arc of the question mark likely comes from the tidal interaction between the galaxies, "and the dot might as well be just a smaller spherical galaxy."
Galaxy mergers are actually a very common astrophysical phenomenon, she adds — even our own galaxy is interacting with its neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy. Garcia Marin similarly calls them "a normal phase in the life and evolution of galaxies."