Someone is smiling down on us

The Hubble Space telescope has come up with a gem for us.

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope will celebrate its 25th anniversary on April 24, and in all those years it has produced multitudes of stunning imagery.

However, we believe this is one of the quirkier ones. The two orange eyes and white button nose are galaxies and the lines imitating a smiley face are actually arcs produced by an effect called 'strong gravitational lensing'.

Nasa tells us that the photo shows a galaxy cluster memorably called SDSS J1038+4849, and since galaxy clusters are the most massive structures we know of in the universe, they "exert such a powerful gravitational pull that they warp the spacetime around them and act as cosmic lenses which can magnify, distort and bend the light behind them".

In this case, the gravitational lensing - or Einstein ring - is made by the galaxy cluster bending the light from behind it, and the source of the light, the galaxy cluster and the telescope being aligned in a straight line to produce the ring-like structure we see here.

If you want to see more spectacular images from Hubble, have a look at their Top 100. It's definitely worth a look.