NASA has captured a rare image that appears to show the sun "smiling" — but not everyone thinks it's as adorable as it sounds.
The image, which was posted on social media by the space agency last week, shows the sun's surface with black splotches that look like two eyes and a smiling mouth.
Explaining why it looked like the sun had a face, NASA said: "Seen in ultraviolet light, these dark patches on the Sun are known as coronal holes and are regions where fast solar wind gushes out into space."
Coronal holes are cooler and less dense regions of plasma in the outermost part of the sun's atmosphere, which is why they are darker in appearance.
The image was captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. It has been monitoring the sun since it was launched back in 2010 as part of the space agency's Living With a Star Program, which studies aspects of the Sun-Earth system that directly affect life and society.
The orbiting observatory routinely captures images of the sun's surface and is monitoring its activity on a nearly continual basis with the spacecraft measuring the sun's interior, atmosphere, magnetic field and energy output.
As they shared the image of the smiley sun on their Twitter, NASA was quick to receive an outpouring of responses from Twitter users chiming in about what they thought the picture resembled.
But people were left divided about the unusual shot, while some thought the image was adorable, others got a much more eerie feel from it.
Some users commented saying that the image looked "scary" and "creepy", leaving them feeling "terrified", while others said that it was "so cute".
One Twitter user compared the picture to the iconic Teletubbies sun, which features the smiling face of a baby in it.
But others thought the image bore a more striking resemblance to the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters.
More comparisons included mini BN biscuits, a lion, a blowfish, an otter and various cartoon characters, including Charlie Brown and Mike Wazowski.
