Happy Halloween! (from Space)

LET THE UNIVERSE WISH YOU A HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

Guessing that you can observe the two eyes, the button nose and the smile, the picture on the left is a snap of a small portion of the universe, as captured by NASA on 31st Oct, 2015, or better known as the night of Halloween.


Now, as easy as it is to assume that witches and ghouls are behind the theatrics, science can explain it neatly: The two eyes are very bright galaxies, the nose is a star and the misleading smile lines are actually arcs caused by an effect known as strong gravitational lensing.


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.