Bad Astronomy » Pareidolia

Carcineidolia

Phil Plait — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 20:26:42 +0000

If there is any definition of "ironic", it must be a smiley face seen in a cancerous cell:

Australian researchers at the Westmead Millennium Institute for Medical Research were investigating how the protein beta-catenin invades a cell’s nucleus and causes it to become cancerous, when they spotted the protein apparently mocking them. You can see this a bit more clearly in the video they made:

The circle is the cell’s nucleus as the protein moves in, and the dark spots are where the protein is blocked. The smiley face doesn’t surprise me; we’re hardwired to see faces and familiar shapes everywhere we look (click the tag marked "pareidolia" — the psych term for this — under this post to see lots of examples). Heck, I spotted one in a supernova once…

And I certainly hope this research yields insight into how to fight cancer. I’d love to see that smirk wiped off that nucleus’s face.

Tip o’ the gamma knife to Amos Zeeberg and Fark. Image credit: Westmead Millennium Institute for Medical Research

Repost: Happy pareidolidays!

Phil Plait — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 14:45:26 +0000

[I don't repost very often, but this one from last year still works. -- The BA]

I know some people have Christmas on their mind today, but this is a bit too literal: a brain scan taken at Newcastle University turned up a familiar face nose:

I always pictured him as somewhat bigger.

The part of the brain they were imaging? The hippocampus. Eh, close enough.

Happy holidays to all, and to all a clear night!

Tip o’ the stirring creature to BABloggee Michael Lonergan

Angry nebula is really REALLY angry

Phil Plait — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 14:00:40 +0000

In the heart of the Large Magellanic Cloud (one of the Milky Way’s many satellite galaxies), there lies a vast complex of gas called 30 Doradus. And inside that sprawling volume of space is the Tarantula Nebula, a star-forming region so huge it dwarfs even our own Orion Nebula. Thousands of stars are churning away in there, going through the process of being born.

And as they do, the hottest and brightest of them carve huge cavities in the nebula, heating the tenuous gas therein to millions of degrees. The result? This:

[Click to embiggen.]

I love this image! It’s a combination of observations from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory (in blue, showing the incredibly hot gas) and from Spitzer Space Telescope (in red, showing cooler gas). Those bubbles of hot, X-ray emitting gas are constrained by the cooler gas around them, but it’s likely the hot gas is expanding, driving the overall expansion of the nebula itself. However, it’s also possible the sheer flood of high-energy radiation from the nascent stars is behind the gas’s expansion… or it’s a combination of both. Astronomers are still arguing over this, and ...

Grow a paireidolia

Phil Plait — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 16:00:51 +0000

I believe without reservation that this may be the greatest instance of pareidolia of all time: an ultrasound of a man experiencing epididymo-orchitis, or pain and swelling of a testicle:

Having suffered through a similar (if less traumatic) version of this, may I add that the expression on the man’s, um, "face" is exquisitely accurate.

Tip o’ the codpiece to my Hive Overmind co-blogger Ed Yong on Google+. Original image: Elsevier, Inc.

Solar purrominence

Phil Plait — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 13:00:39 +0000

I know I’ve posted a lot about the Sun lately, and I know I just posted a funny picture by astrophotographer Alan Friedman. And maybe I should’ve waited for Caturday to post this. But c’mon. How could I not post this as soon as I saw it?

[Click to concatenate.]

It’s a SOL cat! I love how it looks like it’s rubbing its head on the Sun.

If you want the technical description of what you’re seeing, it’s a solar prominence, a long stream of ionized gas belched out by the Sun, flowing along its magnetic field lines.

Think of it as a 80,000 kilometer-long cosmic hairball the Sun hacked up. I will from now on.

And if you liked that picture by Alan, this one will make your hair stand on end!

[UPDATE: Alan calculated the size of this prominence as 80,000 km, and that looks about right to me. So just for comparison, I added the Earth roughly to scale in the picture here. That's a pretty big cat. It's head is bigger than ...

Sunsquatch

Phil Plait — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 17:00:04 +0000

I love the images of the Sun taken by astrophotographer Alan Friedman. I love pareidolia. And I love cryptozoology.

So of course I love love love this:

[Click to sasquatchenate.]

Pareidolia is the trait of seeing recognizable objects in random patterns (usually, but not always, faces). Cryptozoology is the study of fabled creatures like Nessie, or the chupracabra, or… I don’t know, for a totally random example, let’s say Bigfoot.

Still not sure what I mean? Maybe this’ll help:

Ha!

OK, I’ll be a pedantic dork for just a sec, and say that this is actually just a prominence, an eruption of ionized gas off the surface of the Sun, guided by the twisting and churning solar magnetic field. Prominences can take all sorts of shapes — even angels and dragons — as they launch upward and fall back down to the Sun’s surface.

Alan Apeman — urp, sorry, I mean Friedman — takes simply amazing pictures of the Sun which I feature here all the time; see ...

Presleidolia

Phil Plait — Sat, 13 Aug 2011 13:04:17 +0000

Hey, I haven’t posted a fun pareidolia (patterns that look like faces or figures) news article in a while, and this is a good one: a man in Finland found this interesting image on his wall:

[Here's the Google translation into English.]

Of course, the article claims it looks like the Virgin Mary.

Now look: I know that the standard depiction of Mary is usually with her head bent, covered in a cowl, with a robe of some sort. That kind of figure lends itself to pareidolia — it’s an easy shape to make, from oil stains to

A fiery angel erupts from the Sun

Phil Plait — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 18:27:45 +0000

When you build and launch a high-resolution solar observatory that stares at the Sun 24 hours a day, you’re bound to catch some pretty cool stuff. As proof, check out this video of a stunning prominence erupting from the Sun’s surface on July 12, 2011, as seen by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory:

[Make sure you set the resolution to at least 720p.]

That’s really graceful, especially considering that tower reached the staggering height of about 150,000 km (90,000 miles) above the Sun in just a few minutes!

The gas on the Sun is ionized, which means it’s had one or more electrons ripped away from its atoms. Technically called a plasma, this makes it sensitive to the Sun’s strong magnetic forces. That becomes really obvious after it starts to collapse; it doesn’t follow a ballistic trajectory like you’d expect (the path a ball thrown up in the air would follow), but instead flows along the Sun’s magnetic field lines. This video is in the ultraviolet, where such a plasma glows brightly.

For a moment there, just at its peak, it coincidentally looks like a classic angel with wings spread. Of course, once the angel dissolves it forms more of ...

The fist of an angry cloud

Phil Plait — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 13:00:39 +0000

I glanced out my office window the other day and saw what is clearly a sign that the weather is ticked off about something:

Go cloud! Punch that sky!

I was thinking at first the cloud was the result of a big convective updraft; warm air screaming upwards and forming a puffy column. A couple of weeks ago I saw this happen in a ginormous cumulonimbus storm cloud. There were several rapidly rising columns of air moving up so quickly they were forming pilei, which are caps of water vapor that look like little shock waves at the top of the cloud.

However, when I was looking at this fist cloud just a few minutes later as it blew east toward my house, I saw this was just a perspective effect, and it was just a normal puffy cloud.

Too bad. I was getting into it. Give it to the man! Fight the stratus quo!

Related posts:

- Weather satellites capture shots of volcanic plume blasting through clouds
- Like the fist of an angry god
- Alps lapse
- From space: video of five days of tornadoes

Disturbing face distortion illusion

Phil Plait — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 16:48:06 +0000

This is a pretty nifty illusion: as you look at a spot between two rapidly changing images of faces, your brain distorts the images, making them look really weird:

I could do without the title they chose for the video, but the paper on which it’s based is called "Flashed face distortion effect: Grotesque faces from relative spaces", which may not explain much, either. What it means, basically, is that as the faces flash, certain features get distorted by your brain, and the amount of distortion depends on how much that feature deviates from the rest in the set. In other words, someone with slightly larger eyes gets perceived by you as having huge eyes. Go ahead and pause the video and click through it; the faces are pretty much normal faces, so the distortion really is an illusion.

I think that’s pretty neat; I’m fascinated by how our brains perceive faces in particular, since people see them everywhere. I’d love to see some variations on this, like showing men’s faces, or a man on one side and a woman on the other. Would it work for animal faces too? Hmmm.

I’ll note that some people ...

A dragon fight in the heart of Orion

Phil Plait — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 17:49:30 +0000

It’s very common to see familiar things in random patterns. We see faces in clouds, Jesus in a tortilla, and smiley faces everywhere. It’s so ubiquitous there’s a term for it: pareidolia.

So when I saw on reddit that people were talking about seeing an epic dragon fight in the Orion Nebula, I smiled. But then I saw the image, and that smile turned to pure amazement. Why? Because here’s the image:

[Click to ensmaugenate.]

Do you see the dragon on the left, wings outstretched, breathing fire, blasting it at the man on the right? He has a face, and I see his shoulder, back, and outstretched arm as well, as if he’s battling the dragon.

Let me be clear: this picture is real! Well, the dragon and face aren’t real — they’re more pareidolia — but the images in the nebula are actually there. You might see them more easily in this contrast-enhanced version, too.

Let me explain…

OK, first: this really is the Orion Nebula. It was taken by Hubble in 2006, and

Swimming up the Milky Way

Phil Plait — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 13:00:34 +0000

Pareidolia is the psychological term for seeing patterns in random or near-random distributions of things. The Face on Mars, the Man in the Moon, Jesus in a taco shell, and so on… most of the time it manifests as faces, since our brains are geared to recognize them as easily as possible.

But sometimes you get other patterns too. I don’t know about you, but I agree with astronomer Yurii Pidopryhora: this is a dolphin:

It’s actually a cold molecular gas cloud about 25,000 light years away in our galaxy, seen in the radio part of the spectrum. I don’t have much to say, except

1) If that dolphin’s swimming, it must be in liquid helium and not water — note the temperature scale on the right; and

b) Too bad this is in the constellation of Scutum the shield; it should really be in Delphinus.

Image credit: Yurii Pidopryhora (JIVE)

Related posts:

- Angry slippers are angry (a personal fave; I took the picture!)
- Heart and skull nebula
- Carroteidolia
- Happy pareidolidays!

Back from the Old World

Phil Plait — Tue, 17 May 2011 13:41:18 +0000

Mrs. BA and I have spent the last week in Europe, on a Center for Inquiry-sponsored cruise with fellow critical thinkers. I’ll post more later, but yesterday we flew across 8 time zones, arriving home late last night. My body thinks it’s 2:00 in the morning yesterday, or perhaps tomorrow — I was calling the time zone confusion "yestermorrow" on the trip — and I’m a wee bit messed up. So instead of some big post about astronomy or Doctor Who or the latest attack on reality, here is a funny picture of a mail slot/intercom (I think) I saw in a narrow alleyway (as they all are) in Venice.

I think it’s a robot saying, "Meh." If you know what it actually is, please leave a comment. I’ll be sleeping until the day before yesterday.

[UPDATE: In the comments, people are asking about the odd lighting in the picture. I did not use a flash (which would have made the shadows distinct and sharp). The alley I was in - as are all of the Venetian alleys - is tall and narrow, with limited sunlight coming from above. We were not near a ...

Angry slippers are angry

Phil Plait — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 13:00:43 +0000

It’s Caturday, and I have decided to expand my definition once again to include not just animals but also things that aren’t alive that look like things that are alive.

So I present to you angry slippers yelling at you:

What are they yelling about?
"C’mon, man, wash your feet first!" "Keep us off the cold tile floor you jerk!" "Store us next to those yakkity flip-flops again and we’ll make sure the cat leaves you a ‘present’ before you stick your feet in us next time!" "We’re a pair of slippers, not a pareidolia of slippers!" "Wear socks with us again and we swear we’re calling Stacey London!"
These slippers were a gift from my mother-in-law to The Little Astronomer, which just goes to show you the world’s a pretty funny place if you keep your eyes open and sense of humor primed.

Related posts:

- Xtolocaturday
- Caturday nights all right for fighting
- A foxy Caturday
- Languid Caturday

Rushmore, doubt less

Phil Plait — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 14:00:28 +0000

You’ve almost certainly seen pictures of Mount Rushmore; it’s a magnificent carving of the heads of four past US presidents, each almost 20 meters high. Located in South Dakota, it’s in a national park and a big tourist attraction (and the scene of the finale of "North by Northwest").

But did you know it’s evidence that man was intelligently designed? Well, it’s certainly used that way by creationists proponents of Intelligent Design; no less a leading light of ID than William Dembski has used Mt. Rushmore as an example:

Intelligent design begins with a seemingly innocuous question: Can objects, even if nothing is known about how they arose, exhibit features that reliably signal the action of an intelligent cause? To see what’s at stake, consider Mount Rushmore. The evidence for Mount Rushmore’s design is direct—eyewitnesses saw the sculptor Gutzon Borglum spend the better part of his life designing and building this structure. But what if there were no direct evidence for Mount Rushmore’s design? What if humans went extinct and aliens, visiting the earth, discovered Mount Rushmore in substantially the same condition as it is now?

Well, I guess it depends if ...

Carroteidolia

Phil Plait — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 14:00:49 +0000

It’s been forever since I posted some pareidolia: an object or shape that looks like something else. Usually it’s a face or a religious icon — Jesus, Mary, Mohammed, whatever — but really it can be anything.

So behold: the Carrot Shuttle!

That was in a bag of baby carrots. First one I pulled out, too! Pretty cool.

As you can see, it looks even more like the Shuttle from an oblique angle. I love the little rocket nozzle sticking out the back. I think the carrot dried up and cracked while being squeezed by other carrots, flattening it out and giving it the winged shape. Either that or it’s a divine sign that I should be an astronaut.

Of course, I get sick on a kid’s swing set, so that’s probably not it.

… unless this vegetable is actually a sign I should go to Vega! But that can’t be right. They would’ve sent a poet.

Happy pareidolidays!

Phil Plait — Fri, 24 Dec 2010 20:49:43 +0000

I know some people have Christmas on their mind today, but this is a bit too literal: a brain scan taken at Newcastle University turned up a familiar face nose:

I always pictured him as somewhat bigger.

The part of the brain they were imaging? The hippocampus. Eh, close enough.

Happy holidays to all, and to all a clear night!

Tip o’ the stirring creature to BABloggee Michael Lonergan

Flushed with pareidolia

Phil Plait — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 18:00:21 +0000

Pareidolia is the psychology term for seeing faces in random patterns. This usually gets air time due to some vaguely Christlike shape in a stain or something, but not every instance has to be religiously motivated. I don’t want to ignore those secular ones, because, after all, I hate to let anything go to waste.

Behold!

This picture, taken by Mitchell Whitney, was snapped right after an, um, incident that required some vigorous plunging. The only conclusion is that the toilet itself was relieved when it was all over as well.

I have a series of puns all trying to push their way out of my brain, but I’ll let them go because it’s been an exhausting week. I’m pooped.

Tip o’ the plumber’s helper to Dan Durda.

Cectic does pareidolia

Phil Plait — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 21:09:15 +0000

Funny, that seems like an obscure title, but in fact it’s accurate. Cectic is a skeptical web comic. Pareidolia is the human predilection to see faces in random patterns. Recently, Cectic did a comic on pareidolia:

Click it to see the rest (somewhat marginally NSFW and bound to offend some folks). It’s a pretty handy checklist, in fact, for those disposed to thinking that the face they see is anything more than a stain, wood grain, or hair pattern.

The Hallmark of a black hole

Phil Plait — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 17:01:10 +0000

Leon Jenkins is the President of the LA chapter of the NAACP, the organization that advocates for equal rights for black people. The work they do is fine by me, and I support their efforts. But organizations are made up of individuals, and individuals can make mistakes.

This is really one of those times. Here’s the story: Hallmark came out with a card for recent graduates, and it’s one of those deals that has a speaker in it that activates when you open it. Like all such cards it’s twee and sugary and over the top. It involves two cartoon characters with squeaky and high-pitched voices talking about how the graduate can now take over the world. It has an outer space theme to it, and what they say, well… watch/listen for yourself:

Um, yeah. It’s pretty clear to just about anyone who hears it — and doesn’t have any particular stake in the claim — that the card is saying “black holes”. The space theme is obvious enough, and black holes are a common topic. So why on Earth would someone think the card is saying “black whores”, as Mr. Jenkins and other LA NAACP members do?

In fact, there’s ...

Happy chair is happy

Phil Plait — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 20:30:15 +0000

BABloggee John Kennedy (no relation, of course, to Jamie) sent me word about a fun pareidolia site: Happy Chair is Happy. It features inanimate objects that look like faces. It’s really a fun series to poke through, and it’s brought to you by the I Can Haz Cheezeburgers folks.

I’ll note with some amusement that in a recent entry they included a picture I featured here in March of an alien prickly pear cactus. They didn’t have the source, so I left a comment with a link. I do love that picture!

May the cumulus be with you

Phil Plait — Fri, 07 May 2010 18:18:58 +0000

Taking pictures at a Vancouver airport long-time BABloggee Michael Lonergan was, when spotted this odd cloud he did.

When 30,000 feet you reach, look as good you will not.

Too bad this didn’t come out on May the 4th. Of course, the dark side clouds everything…

Supertrampeidolia

Phil Plait — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 19:55:52 +0000

I’m getting lots of email about this bit of pareidolia, purporting to show a shadowy Jesus in some farmland in Püspökladány near Budapest:

But as usual, I see something entirely different. It’s clearly Roger Hodgson, the singer from one of my favorite bands, Supertramp!

I know I’m right; note the hat in both shots. It’s only logical.

Tip o’ the American Breakfast to Michael Meadon, who was the first of many to notify me.

Paireidolia

Phil Plait — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 15:53:31 +0000

On Twitter today geographile linked to some pareidolia that I simply have to keep you abreast of. I won’t post the picture; instead I’ll just send you to the article and note that it is very mildly NSFW and NSF people with grown up sensibilities.

But it made me smile.

Oh– keep the comments clean, folks!

Testeidolia

Phil Plait — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 21:00:44 +0000

[Note: This post honors the day that is April 1.]

I have posted many a picture purporting paranormal parts that are actually just our minds playing tricks on us. But this one really puts us to the test. Or testis.

Yes. It’s a haunted scrotum.

It looks more like a monkey to me than a ghostly face, and there’s a vas deferens between them. Maybe you see something different. Leave a comment if you do, and please keep it clean… but have a ball.

Tip o’ the urethra to Dr. Joe Albietz.