Pictures of space get a lot of smiles around here, but it's pretty rare for one of them to smile back at us.

This adorable image — in which the galaxy cluster SDSS J1038+4849 seems to be smiling at the camera — comes courtesy of the Hubble Space Telescope. It was spotted by Judy Schmidt, who submitted a version of the image to the Hubble's Hidden Treasures image processing competition, where anyone can sift through the Hubble's massive data pools to highlight hitherto ignored sights from the stars.

Our tendency to find faces in inanimate objects is due to a neurological phenomenon called pareidolia. The cause isn't totally clear, but it's probably an evolutionary quirk: Humans are adapted to be really, really good at recognising human faces as other humans, even when they're new to us or the lighting isn't great.

It could be that our brains jump the gun a little and find pseudo facial features where we know there aren't any, leading us to have the unsettling-but-amusing sense that our electric sockets are gaping at us.