This Halloween, NASA has delivered an otherworldly visual treat straight from the cosmos. The haunting image looks like an eerie mask, with two galaxies — IC 2163 and NGC 2207 — drifting in cosmic tandem, resembling a set of ghostly, penetrating eyes. Captured through the combined lens of NASA's James Webb and Hubble Space Telescopes, this galactic duo is more than a pretty picture.
The galaxies' resemblance to a haunting face is unmistakable: their bright, core "eyes" and pink-veined spiral arms appear almost alive. IC 2163, the smaller of the two, sits on the left, its structure reminiscent of an eyelid with sweeping arms that have been slightly altered by its close encounter. NGC 2207, larger and commanding the right side, reveals an intense core, its spiral arms peppered with patches of newly formed blue stars. Together, they create a beaded "mask" floating against the silent blackness of space — a perfect sight amid Halloween celebrations.
This hypnotic sight combines light from two advanced observatories, NASA explains in an article. The Webb Telescope provides the mid-infrared hues, revealing heat-emitting dust clouds, while the Hubble Telescope captures visible and ultraviolet wavelengths, painting a fuller picture of the galaxies' complex structures and star formations.
The blend of these light sources produces colours that feel almost organic, reinforcing the unsettling beauty of the galaxies’ “light scrape”. Scientists suspect these reddish features may hint at shock fronts where cosmic materials collided during their near brush millions of years ago. The effect has left both galaxies with rippling “eyelids” of bright, vein-like arms.
Another imaged shared in the NASA article pinpoints where stars and star clusters are buried within the cold dust that glows throughout the two galaxies that have high star formation rates.
According to the article, these two galaxies are star factories compared to our own Milky Way.
Each year, they forge about two dozen Sun-sized stars — over ten times the rate of our galaxy, which produces just two or three per year. But the frenetic activity doesn’t stop there; seven supernovae have exploded across these galaxies in recent decades, a much higher frequency than the Milky Way’s average of one per 50 years. These supernovae not only clear out surrounding space but also create zones where gas and dust rearrange, cool, and condense, fueling even more star formation. The result is a cosmic “action sequence” of star creation.
Over the coming millions of years, the article says, these galactic neighbours may continue their cosmic dance, merging cores and twisting arms, eventually settling into a single, reshaped galaxy with a single, brilliant “eye” at its centre.