The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) shared a creepy image of the sun over the weekend to celebrate Halloween.
“Active regions on the sun combined to look something like a jack-o-lantern’s face on Oct. 8, 2014. The image was captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, which watches the sun at all times from its orbit in space,” the NASA website read.
The agency posted the photo to its Twitter page on Sunday morning.
“They are markers of an intense and complex set of magnetic fields hovering in the sun’s atmosphere, the corona,” NASA said of the photo.
“This image blends together two sets of extreme ultraviolet wavelengths at 171 and 193 Ångströms, typically colorized in gold and yellow, to create a particularly Halloween-like appearance.”
NASA also provided a link for those who wished to download the “Jack-o-Lantern Sun” image for their upcoming Halloween celebrations.
On September 27, Breitbart News reported that NASA satellites and robotic telescopes helped astronomers at Ohio State University watch a black hole tear a flaming star to pieces and devour it.
“This was a tidal disruption event, which happens when a star passes too close to a black hole,” NASA said in a video posted to Twitter.
“Extreme gravity causes the star to bulge and break apart into a stream of gas. The tail of the stream escapes into space but the rest swings around to form an accretion disk.”
On March 19, the event reached peak brightness and the team of astronomers continued to watch it for months until it was eventually torn apart by the black hole.
“Part of it is, it’s just really cool. We say, ‘Oh my gosh, we saw a star get torn apart by a black hole!’ And at least in astronomy, cool factor is like half of what we do,” said graduate research fellow Patrick Vallely.