NASA captures photo of "smiling sun"

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"The smiling sun" was captured earlier this week by NASA on Wednesday after the agency took to Twitter to say: “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’s Solar Dynamics Observatory is an agency mission intended to examine how solar activity is generated and affects space weather, while its spacecraft measures space's biggest star's interior, atmosphere, magnetic field, and energy output.

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Online users found joy in the discovery and took to social media to compare the "smiling sun" to a carved Halloween pumpkin, a lion, and the sun that's featured in the children’s show Teletubbies.

One user said: “Is that the face of the Stay Puf[t] marshmallow man from Ghostbusters?” while another related it to BN Mini chocolate biscuits that also have smiling faces.

However, space experts advised that the holes in the sun may indicate a solar storm hitting planet Earth on Saturday as Spaceweather.com said: “The cheerful mein [sic] is spewing a triple stream of solar wind toward Earth.”

Solar storms represent a chain of eruptions of both mass and energy emerging from the solar surface which deform the earth’s magnetic field. On account of that, storms increase the visibility of the polar lights, commonly known as auroras, that can be seen in the northern and southern hemispheres.