Hubble telescope spots Space Invader in space
The Hubble Space Telescope takes a gander at a faraway cluster of galaxies and snaps a picture that looks suspiciously like a Space Invaders villain.
Hubble spies with its little eye, something that starts with "S."
(Credit: NASA)
Space Invaders attack! (Click to enlarge.)
(Credit: Screenshot by Amanda Kooser/CNET)Humans have long looked up into space and assigned objects like lions, bears, and hunters to shapes made by the stars. Now the Hubble Space Telescope has looked up into space and discovered an object that looks an awful lot like a classic game creature from Space Invaders.
The image was taken in infrared light by Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 and combined with near-infrared observations from Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys.
"The gravitational field surrounding this massive cluster of galaxies, Abell 68, acts as a natural lens in space to brighten and magnify the light coming from very distant background galaxies," the Space Telescope Science Institute says. "Like a funhouse mirror, lensing creates a fantasy landscape of arc-like images and mirror images of background galaxies."
One of those funhouse images conveniently formed into a Space Invaders baddie look-alike. The galactic Space Invader should offer no threat to our humble little planet since it's located well over 2 billion light-years away.
Just in case, perhaps we should start working on a really giant video game arcade to blast it out of the universe.
A close-up of the Space Invader look-alike.
(Credit: ESA, and the Hubble Heritage/ESA-Hubble Collaboration, NASA)(Via Universe Today)
