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NASA Hubble telescope eyes creepy space 'face' for Halloween

Boo! NASA and ESA's space telescope looked out into the cosmos and found two glowing eyes staring back.

Amanda Kooser
Freelance writer Amanda C. Kooser covers gadgets and tech news with a twist for CNET. When not wallowing in weird gear and iPad apps for cats, she can be found tinkering with her 1956 DeSoto.
Amanda Kooser
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Hubble found a spooky spot in space for Halloween 2019.

NASA/ESA/J. Dalcanton/B.F. Williams/M. Durbin (University of Washington)

The Hubble Space Telescope sure knows how to celebrate Halloween. Last year, it spotted a bat shadow and a ghost nebula. This year, it's a haunting face with glowing eyes.

What looks like a deformed skull or a ghostly alien face is actually two galaxies in the process of colliding with each other. 

"Each 'eye' is the bright core of a galaxy, the result of one galaxy slamming into another," NASA said in a release Monday. "The outline of the face is a ring of young blue stars. Other clumps of new stars form a nose and mouth."  

This galaxy system is called Arp-Madore 2026-424 and it's located 704 million light-years away. The head-on crash created the unusual ring shape. "Ring galaxies are rare, and only a few hundred of them reside in our larger cosmic neighborhood," ESA said on its Hubble site. NASA and ESA jointly operate Hubble.

This spooky space facade won't last forever. The two galaxies will eventually merge, but that's 1 or 2 billion years away from happening. We're just lucky to see this cosmic cosplay in action.

Spooky space images show creepy side of the cosmos

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