With Halloween just around the corner, even the Sun seems to be showing off its spooky side. Earlier this week, NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) snapped a striking image that looks uncannily like a cosmic jack-o'-lantern smiling down at Earth.
The photo, taken by SDO's Atmospheric Imaging Assembly, shows glowing eyes, a bright nose, and one wide, dark "mouth" -- a coronal hole where magnetic fields open and allow solar wind to stream freely into space. According to the Space Weather Prediction Center, that burst of fast-moving particles is now racing toward Earth and could trigger minor to moderate geomagnetic storms through Wednesday.
Those disturbances may briefly affect satellites and power systems, and if conditions strengthen, could also push the northern lights farther south than usual.
The eerie likeness isn't intentional, of course. Our brains are wired to recognize familiar shapes, a psychological phenomenon known as pareidolia -- the same reason people see faces in clouds or the "man in the moon."
Space.com, which first reported the images, notes that this kind of Halloween-themed coincidence isn't new. The Sun has shown similar expressions before: a "smile" captured in 2022 and a jack-o'-lantern-like glow spotted in 2014 -- both caught by the same spacecraft, which has been observing the Sun since 2010.
And for longtime skywatchers, the timing might feel familiar. Twenty-two years ago this week, the "Halloween Storms of 2003" sent one of the most powerful eruptions of the Space Age crashing into Earth's magnetic field, unleashing vivid auroras as far south as Texas and California and briefly disrupting satellites and power grids.