
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.