With three dark blotches popping up in the sun's atmosphere, our closest star seems to 'smile' even as it prepares to pelt our planet with violent solar wind.
They say that when you smile, the world smiles with you. And when the sun smiles, the world gets bathed in plasma barf.
Perhaps the sun heard some good news. Perhaps it is tickled that we have finally discovered evidence of devastating solar storms hidden in ancient tree rings — the closest thing the sun has to"deep cuts" in its catalog of catastrophic outbursts. Much like sunspots, which are dark blotches of chaotic magnetic activity that occur down on the sun's surface, coronal holes appear black because they are cooler than the plasma that surrounds them. From these cool portals, the sun's constant wind of charged particles streams into space at more than 1 million mph .
See moreWe can see the smiley sun's coronal holes so clearly because the solar wind from those holes is blowing directly toward Earth. Astronomers expect the electric wind to crash into Earth's magnetic field sometime Saturday or Sunday , possibly inducing a minor geomagnetic storm, according to Spaceweather.com.
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