Humans have a habit of looking to the cosmos for answers to our most existential questions. Now, the universe appears to have a question of its own, or at least the tail-end of a query.
A near-perfectly formed question mark — seemingly scrawled in a glowing celestial font — was captured by the James Webb Space Telescope in a photograph released on July 26.
The unmistakable symbol is hidden in a photo, which, at first glance, is beautiful, but not out of the ordinary.
In the foreground, a pair of nascent stars, named Herbig-Haro 46/47, are seen wrapped inside a colorful nebulous mass located about 1,470 light-years away from Earth, according to an accompanying description.
But a closer look at the fringes of the photo, specifically the bottom portion, reveals the oddity in question: a fiery piece of punctuation, the simple but expressive question mark.
The cosmic question mark might be a pair of colliding galaxies, one expert said.
“It’s something unusual, something odd,” Christopher Britt, an education and outreach scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute, the organization that operates the telescope, told McClatchy News.
“It’s probably a merger of galaxies happening in the background,” Britt said. “A lot of times when galaxies are growing through cosmic time, they’ll run into their near neighbors, and when that happens, the gravity as they pass by one another can strip off these tails of stars, these tidal tails.”
Other astrophysicists were in agreement.
Kai Noeske, a communication program officer at the European Space Agency, told McClatchy News that it “looks like a group or a chance alignment of 2 or 3 galaxies.”
“It’s pure chance that it looks like a question mark,” Claude Canizares, a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said. It’s “like seeing animal shapes in clouds.”
Just how far away the shape in the celestial clouds is located is unknown, Britt said. But based on its red coloring and size in the photo, it’s safe to say it’s not close.
Distant objects appear red because, over long distances, wavelengths of light stretch, shifting into the redder parts of the light spectrum, according to NASA.
The luminous punctuation, though odd, is not first human symbol to be spotted in space.
Colliding galaxies photographed in 2011 appeared to form an exclamation point, according to NASA. And in 2018, the Hubble Space Telescope captured a “galactic smiley face.” The universally understood symbol of friendliness was made up of warped galaxies.
“If you look at tens of thousands of objects that have been randomly distorted by either gravitational lensing or these mergers, then some of them are just going to happen to end up in shapes that look familiar,” Britt said.
When gazing up at the heavens, people also have a tendency to look for recognizable objects, Britt said.
That means that stargazers were bound to spot a question mark or some other human symbol out in the vastness of space. It was just a question of time.
