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Sun Makes Nervous Face with Hole in Its Head (Video)

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The sun has been making some anxious faces lately — but you'd be worried, too, if a huge hole had just opened up on your head.

The sun's apparent nervousness crops up in photos captured over the past few days by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO); you can see the gorgeous images compiled into a video here.

Material zooms away from coronal holes as part of the high-speed solar wind, which can cause geomagnetic storms here on Earth. Indeed, particles flowing from a coronal hole last autumn triggered powerful auroral displays, NASA officials said.

But the "mouth" is middling as far as coronal holes go; a much larger one is visible in the new SDO images as well, draped over the top of the solar sphere like a bad toupee.

The human brain searches hard for patterns and meaning in the data it analyzes, which explains why people may see a face in the sun or on Mars, a man in the moon, or Jesus Christ on a piece of toast. This phenomenon, seeing a recognizable shape in a random image, is known as pareidolia.

The sun seems to be making a nervous face in this image, which was captured on July 14, 2016 by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory spacecraft. (Image credit: NASA/SDO/AIA)

"The pareidolia is strong today #FaceOfTheSun," astrophysicist Karl Battams, of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., tweeted today (July 14), along with a photo of the "anxious" sun.

The $800 million SDO mission launched in February 2010. The spacecraft's high-definition photos are helping researchers better understand the sun's magnetic field and solar activity, including how and why that activity varies over time.

Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

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Mike Wall
Mike Wall
Space.com Senior Writer
Michael was a science writer for the Idaho National Laboratory and has been an intern at Wired.com, The Salinas Californian newspaper, and the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. He has also worked as a herpetologist and wildlife biologist. He has a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology from the University of Sydney, Australia, a bachelor's degree from the University of Arizona, and a graduate certificate in science writing from the University of California, Santa Cruz.