MUST-SEE: Solar scientist shares photo of our smiley sun
Digital Reporter
Saturday, December 3, 2016, 3:34 PM - It appears the sun has been quite happy lately.
Images taken by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory on Dec. 2 show a pattern of sunspots on the star that, when viewed from afar, form a smiley face.
"Tilt your head to the left and smile back at the Sun," Karl Battams, an astrophysicist at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C. posted on Twitter.
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Tilt your head to the left and smile back at the Sun! #SolarPareidolia pic.twitter.com/p5UNnnq4sx
— Karl Battams (@SungrazerComets) December 2, 2016
Battams told Mashable that the sun's "eyes" are active regions commonly associated with sunspots, which are darker, cooler patches on the star caused when intense magnetic activity blocks heat convection.
The mouth" is a solar filament, a huge arc of plasma (electrified gas) in the sun's atmosphere. They appear dark because they are not as hot as the sun's surface behind them.
Finally, the "nose" is a coronal hole. They are "low-density regions of the sun's atmosphere, known as the corona," according to NASA.
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"Because they contain little solar material, they have lower temperatures and thus appear much darker than their surroundings."
The Solar Dynamics Observatory has the ability to take several images of the sun at the same time, but in various wavelengths of light.
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