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LiveScience
LiveScience
Brandon Specktor

What??? James Webb telescope finds giant question mark in space

A telescope image showing many distant galaxies, with some forming a question mark-like shape in the middle.

Since ancient times, humans have looked to the stars for answers to life's biggest questions. Now, new images from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) reveal a bizarre cosmic object that appears to be throwing a question of its own right back at us.

Spotted by JWST's Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph instrument, the object in question is a pair of distant galaxies being warped, magnified and multiplied into the shape of a cosmic question mark. Inquisitive aliens are (likely) not responsible — rather, it's caused by a rare form of a common cosmological phenomenon called gravitational lensing, NASA researchers revealed in a statement.

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