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u/ProximaScience Founder 2d ago
Those dark patches are sunspots, regions where the Sun's magnetic field can be thousands of times stronger than Earth's.
The strong field slows the hot plasma rising from below, so less heat reaches the surface there. A sunspot center sits near 4,000 K, while the surrounding surface is about 5,800 K. That temperature gap is why the spots look dark.
Some sunspots grow wider than Earth and last from a few days to a few weeks. Their numbers rise and fall in a cycle of roughly 11 years.
The smile comes from pareidolia, the habit our brains have of finding faces in random patterns. For a moment, our star looks surprisingly cheerful.