The sun hasn’t got his hat on here. But we can still cry hip hip hip hooray – because he’s wearing the broadest, warmest of smiles.
That’s the impression given by this amazing picture released by Nasa.
Seen in ultraviolet light, the sun’s friendly expression is formed of patches known as coronal holes – regions where fast solar wind shoots out into space.
But to us 93million miles away on Earth, they look like two eyes and a radiant smile.
Seen in ultraviolet light, the sun’s friendly expression is formed of patches known as coronal holes – regions where fast solar wind shoots out into space
Every 12 seconds, Nasa’s solar dynamics observatory (SDO) photographs the sun in ten different wavelengths of ultraviolet light.
The new SDO image shows the coronal holes, which are dark because they are the least active regions of the sun.
These areas in the outer atmosphere emit charged particles that can trigger geomagnetic storms when they reach Earth.
This sort of ‘space weather’ poses a threat to the function of our orbiting satellites.
