The American Fun Science website published a report on October 29 entitled “The “smiling” sun may hit the earth with a geomagnetic storm this weekend. The full text is excerpted as follows:
It is said that when you smile, the whole world laughs with you. But when the sun smiles, the world is bathed in a downpour of plasma.
NASA’s ‘smiley’ image of the sun captured on October 26
That’s the unfortunate subtext that emerges when our nearest star shows us its lovely “smiley face.” Images taken by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory on October 26 show three distinct black spots in the sun’s atmosphere, resembling a pair of round eyes and a cheerful triangular mouth.
NASA says these happy blobs are actually coronal holes — located in the corona, the regions of the sun’s outermost atmosphere through which the solar wind travels into space.
Coronal holes, much like sunspots, appear black because they are cooler than the surrounding plasma. Through these “cool” portals, the sun’s constant wind of charged particles pours into space at more than 1.6 million kilometers per hour.
The reason we can see the smiling coronal holes so clearly is because the solar wind passing through these holes is blowing head-on toward Earth. Astronomers expect the wind of charged particles to smash into Earth’s magnetic field sometime on October 29 or 30, potentially triggering a mini-geomagnetic storm, SpaceWeather reported.
Even the weakest geomagnetic storm, a G1 class, has the potential to disrupt the operation of orbiting satellites and cause small-scale grid fluctuations on Earth.
This isn’t the first time in recent years that people have seen the outlines of faces from inanimate objects in the universe, a phenomenon known as a “fantasy optical illusion.” From the Godzilla monster sketched by scientists on a nebula, to the Muppets identified by Mars researchers on the red planet, it has to be said that this is indeed a glimpse of the ruthless plasma-spraying universe. The golden age of vice friendly faces.