Webb telescope has answers for an actual question mark in space

Did the cosmos just hand us a meme that encapsulates our feelings about the universe and our place within it? At times it seems as though astronomers will forever find enigmas about space without ever providing satisfying answers. But in this case, the James Webb Space Telescope has found a riddle in the sky, and scientists can actually give us an explanation for it. Webb, an infrared telescope built by NASA and its European and Canadian counterparts, captured this image of galaxy cluster MACS-J0417.5-1154. It looks like a literal question mark. That's because massive celestial objects are warping the fabric of spacetime and distorting galaxies in the background, playing tricks like a funhouse mirror. The effect is caused by a quirk of nature known as gravitational lensing, a phenomenon predicted in Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. "These galaxies, seen billions of years ago when star formation was at its peak, are similar to the mass that the Milky Way galaxy would have been at that time," said Marcin Sawicki, an astronomer at Saint Mary’s University in Nova Scotia, in a statement. "Webb is allowing us to study what the teenage years of our own galaxy would have been like." SEE ALSO: Scientists haven't found a rocky exoplanet with air. But now they have a plan. The question mark is actually five copies of the galaxy pair, four of which make the top of the question mark. The dot below them is an unrelated galaxy that just happens to be in the right place from Webb's perspective. Credit: NASA / ESA / CSA / STScI / Vicente Estrada-Carpenter The image shows two distant interacting galaxies: one a face-on spiral; the other dusty red in side view. They appear multiple times, with the dusty red galaxy forming the arc of the question-mark shape. To explain how gravitational lensing works, astronomers start with the analogy of a bowling ball placed on a foam mattress or trampoline. This depicts how the fabric of spacetime bends around massive celestial object