NASA’s satellite captures ‘spooky smiley face’ on sun after solar eclipse

With Halloween around the corner, it looks like the Sun has also donned a spooky costume of its own as the NASA has captured a strange smiley face pattern of the Sun, post the partial solar eclipse.

According to a report by the ‘Newsweek’, the image was captured on October 26, with NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) spacecraft.

The strange smiley face is reportedly the result of coronal holes — areas of the sun’s atmosphere that are cooler and less dense than surrounding plasma. The temperature differences make for darker spots that appear to populate the sun’s surface, those spots most recently creating what appears to be a smiley face.

Say cheese! Today, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory caught the Sun “smiling”. Seen in ultraviolet



light, these dark patches on the Sun are known as coronal holes and are regions where fast solar wind gushes out into space,” NASA Sun wrote in the caption of the post.

The picture has garnered around 11K likes and nearly 2.5 K retweets, with scores of people filling the comment sections with memes and startled reactions over the picture.

“Pretty cool but at the same time, horrifying,” wrote one user. “Apparently the Sun is secretly adorable, who knew?” said another.

Meanwhile, it is reported that the sun’s coronal holes can have physical effects on Earth and can interact with the Earth’s magnetic field and disturb it. However, no such phenomenon has been reported and no space weather alerts have been issued.