those pareidolia that ignite the imagination

by time news

A bear on Mars? The photo intrigues. NASA unveiled a photograph on January 25 showing what looks like a bear cub’s head on the Martian surface. The image was taken in December by the US space agency’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter satellite orbiting Mars with the HiRISE high-resolution on-board camera. The photograph in question was shared on the NASA project’s Twitter account.

If the photo looks convincing, it’s actually an optical illusion called pareidolia, a bias that involves associating an ambiguous visual stimulus with an identifiable item, often a human or animal form.

According to scientists from the University of Arizona, who are leading the project, the bear’s face is actually a strange geological formation that stretches over two kilometers. This is made up of craters, hills and a “circular fracture”, which delimits the contours of the head and could be formed by a deposit of lava or mud. The whole thing gives the impression of seeing the smiling face of a teddy bear.

A cliche far from unique

Photos taken in space are often subject to this type of interpretation. the rover Perseverancethe robot explorer on a mission to the Red Planet since April 2021, took several shots that fueled the collective imagination.

The latest is this photograph showing a ball of tangled yarn, unveiled by NASA on July 12, 2022. If the American space agency did not specify the nature of the object, it could be pieces of the rope connecting the rover to the deployed parachute to slow its descent during its landing. The rope could also have been used to lower it during the last meters, a stage called “sky crane”.

Two months earlier, in May 2022, the robot on Mars had also immortalized a rock in which a cavity was dug suggesting a doorway. Not to mention the photo of a rock on which we see the silhouette of a reclining man, taken in April 2021, causing a craze on social networks about the existence of life on Mars in February 2022.

Smile or Halloween pumpkin?

The pareidolia observed in images of the red planet are far from the only ones to have aroused curiosity around the world. NASA had shared in October 2022 an image of the Sun captured in ultraviolet by the Solar Dynamics observatory. The star has three spots on its surface, suggesting that it is smiling.

Internet users then reacted to NASA’s tweet, some comparing the image of the star to a carved Halloween pumpkin or the sun in the Teletubbies, a British children’s television series. According to the US space agency, the use of ultraviolet light has made visible dark spots on the surface of the Sun, known as “coronal holes”corresponding to the regions where the solar wind shoots out into space.

Illusions of this type have been observed on other space images, notably from Mars, suggesting in turn the presence on the red planet of a spoon, a face, Greek statues, plastic waste and even… a squirrel.

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