NASA is celebrating Halloween in a big way. Monday, the space agency shared two images it captured of the Sun, both equally more horrifying than the last. The tamer of the two was shared on Twitter, showing wind gusts distorting the sun’s rays into a smiling face that’s as adorable as it is spooky.
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“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,” the agency’s Sun office tweeted.
According to one professor, the smiling could signal an impending solar storm. “Scientists expect that to happen on average, with a couple percent probability, every year, and we’ve just dodged all these magnetic bullets for so long,” Brian Keating, physics professor at the University of California at San Diego, said in a Halloween interview with the Washington Post. “So it could be really scary, and the consequences could be much more dramatic, especially in our technology-dependent current society. There could be something on our way for Halloween night after all. Pretty spooky, but hopefully not too spooky.”
Then comes a much more sinister throwback. On Instagram, the official NASA account shared a darker image captured eight years ago showing the sun as if it’s a cross between Jack Skellington and Sam from Trick ‘r Treat.
“This solar jack-o-lantern, captured by our Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) in October 2014, gets its ghoulish grin from active regions on the Sun, which emit more light and energy than the surrounding dark areas. Active regions are markers of an intense and complex set of magnetic fields hovering in the sun’s atmosphere,” NASA added.
NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory—the one responsible for both images—has been in operation since 2010 monitoring solar activity and the like.
