‘Smiling’ sun warms hearts, but it’s not all cute stuff

A space-based Nasa observatory has captured an image of the Sun seemingly smiling like an emoji or its representation in the children’s television series Teletubbies.

The image – seen in ultraviolet light – has since spread far and wide after the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) posted it on social media, warming millions of hearts and spawning memes, but also raising warnings over what it actually means.

Nasa’s heliophysics department was among the first to call it the “smiling” Sun.

“Say cheese,” it said on its Twitter account, and then went on to describe the dark patches that seem to make up the Sun’s eyes and mouth as “coronal holes and regions where fast solar wind gushes out into space”.

Coronal holes are regions where solar wind escapes more quickly and readily into space, making these regions cooler. These winds can clock up to 2.9 million kmh.

At the peak of a sunspot cycle, coronal holes can appear almost anywhere on the Sun, creating images that appeal to imaginative observers.

Britons put their own spin and photoshopped the image to turn the Sun into a smiling pumpkin.

Others said the smiling Sun looked more like the giant Marshmallow Man in the movie Ghostbusters, or that it more resembled a smiling potato snack or blobfish.

Ever the bearer of bad news, scientists said what was being misconstrued as something cute may actually be bad for life on planet Earth.

The image was taken by Nasa’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, which probes the Sun for the solar weather it spawns and the impact it has on Earth.

Experts say the image suggests that a solar storm is hitting the planet.

“The cheerful mein (sic) is spewing a triple stream of solar wind towards Earth,” Spaceweather.com warned.

The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Centre issued a minor geomagnetic storm watch that started last Saturday.

Solar storms are outbursts coming from the Sun that deform the Earth’s magnetic field. They make the “northern lights” dazzling, but they also disrupt Global Positioning System satellites and communications equipment, and create harmful currents in power grids and pipelines.

Nasa took photos of the Sun back in 2014 that also resembled something familiar: a huge, fiery jack-o-lantern.