Courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Ariz.Life & CultureListsThe five spookiest sights haunting outer spaceFrom eerie faces in the clouds above Jupiter, to distant hell planets, to the omnipresent terror of the dark universeShareLink copied ✔️October 31, 2023Life & CultureListsTextThom Waite The majority of space is a dark, cold, empty expanse where no life can survive and the limits of human knowledge are stretched beyond their limit, falling short of its deepest and eeriest mysteries. It’s no surprise, then, that it has long been a source of inspiration for horror lovers, from the sci-fi community that swarmed around Weird Tales a century ago, to the likes of Stanley Kubrick and Ridley Scott, who have mined the isolation of deep space for its existential dread and extraterrestrial scares. It doesn’t require a literary genius or master filmmaker to cast space in a spooky light, though. Sometimes all you have to do is turn your eyes toward the night sky, where the little matter that is out there takes on a variety of eerie forms, from black holes that threaten to spaghettify anything that comes close, to ghostly nebulas and fiery hell planets that beam strange signals into the void. Thanks to increasingly powerful tools like the James Webb Space Telescope, we're finding more of these spooky sights all the time. Just in time for Halloween, for example, NASA has shared a photo of an eerie “face” in the clouds above Jupiter, peeking out from behind the planet’s terminator – AKA the line where day meets night. Captured by the space agency’s Juno spacecraft, it’s far from the only time a giant “face” has been spotted floating around in our solar system. (Remember last year, when the sun flashed us a cheeky little smile?) Largely, this is down to an effect called pareidolia, which causes humans to see faces or shapes in seemingly random patterns. Then again... do you really want to take any chances? What if it was an ancient evil, awakened by our spacecraft buzzing around its head? Below, we’ve gathered some of the spookiest sights in space, besides Jupiter’s frowning face, for your Halloween viewing pleasure. 1/5 You may like next 1/5 1/5 THE WITCH HEAD NEBULATechnically named IC 2118 (boring), the Witch Head Nebula is thought to be the remains of an ancient supernova or a massive gas cloud, lit up by a nearby blue supergiant star (Rigel) in the Orion constellation. Unsurprisingly, it gets its name from looking like the profile of an old crone with a long nose and pointy chin, and we all know what that means – black magic!view more + 2/5 2/5 THE HAND OF GODTechnically, the Hand of God nebula is the remains of a star explosion, mixed around by the emissions of a stellar corpse – all in all, pretty spooky in itself. What’s even eerier, though, is its shape: like a giant, interstellar hand, its fingers reach out into the darkness, grasping toward a glowing red object that it dropped during the star’s fiery death.view more + 3/5 3/5 Courtesy of NASA, Viking 1MYSTERIOUS BEINGS ON MARSThe possibility of life on Mars isn’t a particularly new idea (although recent research has uncovered new evidence for a living population in the Red Planet’s past). Nevertheless, it must have come as a surprise when an astronomer spotted a hooded, humanlike figure on the planet’s surface in 2008. Unfortunately, scientists were quick to debunk the claim that a humanoid, or their oxygen-starved ghost, was really walking around on Mars... it was actually just a rock. Since then, though, others have seen different figures and faces on Mars, which also bear an uncanny resemblance to humans back on Earth. Probably the most famous of these is a “face” in the Cydonia region, captured by the NASA orbiter Viking 1. Is it probably just pareidolia at play again? Yes. But who knows, maybe the first Mars settlers will find more than they bargained for...view more + 4/5 4/5 Artwork courtesy of NASA, ESA, CSATHE HELL PLANET55 Cancri e hit the news recently, because scientists suggested that they’d been able to decode a mysterious signal that has been emitted by the “hell planet” for the last 20 years. (More on that here.) Why do they call it a hell planet in the first place? Well, one side of the planet reaches a staggering 2,430 degrees Celsius, while the other is cloaked in eternal night. Researchers also predict that the surface is covered in diamonds, but with an equal prevalence of volcanoes every day on the surface would quite literally be a living hell. It’s probably best to just admire it from afar (which is handy, since we’re about 40 light-years away from its parent star).view more + 5/5 5/5 THE DARK UNIVERSEOK, so dark matter isn’t technically a sight, since we can’t actually see it. In this case, though, that makes it even spookier, since it’s thought to make up – alongside dark energy – around 95 per cent of the universe as a whole. It’s often said that humans are most scared of the unknown, and dark matter dominates in this area, too. We can only speculate about its properties by its effects on the “normal” matter around it, and otherwise we know very little about what it does or where it came from. Essentially, it shapes entire galaxies and holds the universe together while staying invisible and totally mysterious. HP Lovecraft, eat your heart out.view more + 0/5 0/5