NASA Captures Eerie Image of the Sun “Smiling”

NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory photographed the sun "smiling." These dark spots are known as coronal holes and are areas where fast solar wind streams out into space when seen in ultraviolet light.

A NASA observatory captured what popped up to be a jack-o'-lantern-esque smile on the sun's surface, revealing what are actually cool splotches on the sun's surface.

The image, captured by NASA's space-based Solar Dynamics Observatory, was shared on social media last week, prompting a flood of comments speculating on what the pattern of erratic dark spots resembled.

The NASA heliophysics department's official Twitter account simply referred to it as a "smiling" sun, while the United Kingdom's Science and Technology Facilities Council weighed in by photoshopping a pumpkin into the image, turning it into a jack-o'-lantern.

Other users spotted the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man from the film "Ghostbusters," a lion, a blobfish, and a variety of snack foods with smiley faces.

According to the space agency, the dark areas that make up the facial pattern are coronal holes, which appear as unusual black patches when the sun is imaged in ultraviolet light or certain types of X-ray images.

Coronal holes are darker in appearance because they are not as hot as the surrounding areas and are not as dense. They can appear at any time on the solar surface.

Their magnetic field structure also creates coronal holes, which release streams of solar wind or charged particles at speeds exceeding one million miles per hour (1.6 million kilometers per hour). These winds are strong enough to reach the Earth. Our planet's magnetic field, which acts as a shield, deflects solar wind activity to a large extent, but it can disrupt the atmosphere.

The NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, captures such images of the sun on a regular basis and monitors its activity almost continuously. The orbiting observatory was launched in 2010 as part of NASA's Living with a Star Program, which aims to study how solar activity affects our home planet and the space between Earth and our home star.