A NASA observatory caught what seemed like a jack-o'-lantern smile on the sun's surface, but were really splotches on the sun's surface that are colder than the surrounding regions.
Last week, NASA posted a picture of the sun captured by its Solar Dynamics Observatory. The image sparked a flood of comments offering explanations on the image's pattern of irregular black spots.
While NASA's official Twitter account referred to it as a "smiling" sun, the Science and Technology Facilities Council of the United Kingdom photoshopped a pumpkin into the image, converting the sun into a jack-o'-lantern.
Various users saw animals like lions and blobfish, as well as snack snacks emblazoned with happy grins.
However, the space agency reports that the dark regions leading to the face pattern are really coronal holes, which appear as uneven black patches when the sun is shown in ultraviolet light or certain kinds of X-ray imaging.
Since coronal holes are cooler and less dense than their surroundings, they seem darker. There's no telling when they'll make an appearance on the Sun's surface.
Because of the way their magnetic fields are shaped, coronal holes are able to open and spew forth charged particles from the sun at speeds of over a million miles per hour (1.6 million kilometres per hour). The force of these winds is sufficient to reach Earth. While the protective magnetic field of Earth deflects most solar wind, even this little exposure may cause atmospheric disturbances.
The NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, takes such pictures of the sun on the regular and watches its activities virtually nonstop. The space agency's Living With a Star Program sent the observatory into orbit in 2010, with the goal of studying the effects of the sun on Earth and the interstellar medium.
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