The James Webb Space Telescope recently chanced upon something rather interesting, which can be seen in the center of that red-outlined square at the bottom of the above picture. Well, as it is, I guess it's a little too small to be of much interest to anybody, so let's enlarge it a bit:
That's right, it's a cosmic question mark! Boy, we've wasted all these years debating the possibility of extraterrestrial life when we really should have been focused on extraterrestrial punctuation. Scientists theorize it's merely two galaxies colliding with each other, which can result in all kinds of interesting shapes when seen from a very great distance. Andromeda and our own Milky Way galaxy are set on a collision course some four billion years from now, so who knows, we may end up an exclamation point or even a semicolon. An ampersand would be cool. With our luck it will probably be an asterisk, just another footnote in interstellar history.
As you might expect, there are those who don't buy it as an astronomical optical illusion at all, but instead see it as evidence of a Supreme Being. If so, then I find the prospect profoundly disturbing. After all, we're the one that are supposed to be asking the questions, not God!
