Strange discovery on Mars that looks exactly like a human face: ScienceAlert

Mars pareidolia strikes again. The image taken by the Perseverance spacecraft while carrying out its duties is one of the most horrifying to date: it looks for all the world like a dried out, decaying human head, cut off from any body, withering under the harsh sunlight. sun.

It’s not a human head, which you might be relieved (or horrified) to know. It is – like most things on Mars, not a piece of ice, cloud, dust or a neat crater – a rock, which just happens to look like something else.

This particular rock Photographed on September 27, 2024, the monster headland looks sideways like a piece of sedimentary sandstone not unlike the other rocks surrounding it. This is not unusual for Mars, especially where water was previously thought to have flowed.

The thing that makes it unusual is its shape: the way it is curled up, and angled toward the camera, makes it look like a head, lying on its side, showing similarities to the edge of an eyebrow, nose, mouth, and chin.

Pareidolia, or the identification of meaningful shapes and images in random objects and arrangements, is surprisingly common among images of Mars. So far we’ve found rocks resembling a bear’s face, a mushroom, and a carved image of a warrior. Bigfoot is very smallA spoonAnd femurs and even bugs.

It is thought to happen when your eyes see an arrangement of shadows, objects or shapes, and some parts of your brain process visual information Jump to conclusions Before the rest of your gray matter catches up, that is for sure It happens here on Earth too. There’s even a special block of tissue dedicated to quick face recognition, housed inside the device Fusiform gyrus Deep inside the brain.

Take a look through Onformative’s Google Faces Project,to recognize face-like shapes in Google Earth images. the Guardian of the Badlands is a particularly famous example. Other examples include what resembles human faces that have been spotted One grain of sand.

It’s a remarkable coincidence that a rock on Mars could be eroded into the shapes and dimensions of a human head, but that’s about it. So far, there is no evidence that complex life has appeared on or visited the Red Planet.

Humanity hopes to change that, by planning future manned missions to Mars. We may just be aliens leaving behind mysterious objects to confuse other space explorers in the distant future.