It's almost hard to believe this is real, but NASA says it is! In fact the image below shows a collision between two galaxies (image credit: NASA, ESA, and J. Dalcanton, B.F. Williams, and M. Durbin (University of Washington)). "Each 'eye' is the bright core of a galaxy, one of which slammed into another. The outline of the face is a ring of young blue stars. Other clumps of new stars form a nose and mouth. The entire system is catalogued as Arp-Madore 2026-424," NASA shared in a press release Monday.
NASA went on to explain these types of head-on collisions between two galaxies similar in size are pretty rare. The fact that the two bright spots that look like eyes are about the same size shows the galaxies were similar in size when they collided. Normally this happens between a big galaxy and a small one. The "ring" framing the face in this picture shows how violent that collision was and won't last very long. These features will all eventually merge into the new galaxy. According to NASA, "ring galaxies are rare; only a few hundred of them reside in our larger cosmic neighborhood. The galaxies have to collide at just the right orientation to create the ring."
This image was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in June of this year, and this system is 704 million light-years away from Earth.
In October 2014 NASA shared the image below of our sun looking like a Jack-o-lantern (image credit:NASA/SDO). The Solar Dynamics Observatory studies our sun, and basically said this was just an interesting coincidence. These particular spots appear brighter because those area "emit more light and energy," according to NASA.
