Don't Look Too Closely At This Photo Of Saturn's Moon If You Have Trypophobia

Fine, but don't say I didn't warn you.

This is Hyperion, a small moon of Saturn, but you'd be forgiven for thinking it was a sea sponge because it's FULL OF TINY HOLES.

NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

(For the uninitiated, trypophobia is the fear of holes and you definitely have it.)

It's weirdly shaped (with dimensions 410 x 260 x 220km) and is entirely porous. Scientists think it's mostly made of ice, with some rock thrown in. Hyperion is one of the largest irregularly-shaped objects we know of and could be that way because it's a fragment of a larger body that was broken up.

This image was taken by the Cassini spacecraft when it was 62,000km away from the moon and was originally released in 2005.

The sponginess is not even the weirdest thing about it. According to the European Space Agency, the moon gave the Cassini spacecraft a huge electric shock:

During the flyby, Cassini got more than it bargained for as Hyperion unleashed a burst of charged particles towards the spacecraft, effectively delivering a giant 200-volt electric shock. It appears that Hyperion's surface becomes electrostatically charged as it is bathed in charged particles – both those constantly streaming out into space from the Sun and those trapped within the magnetic field of the moon's host planet, Saturn.