Solar Flare Was Accompanied by Magnitude 11.3 Quake on Sun

A solar flare that shot out a huge bubble of superheated gas was accompanied by a quake inside the sun equal to a magnitude 11.3 shaker on Earth, researchers found. The sunquake released 40,000 times the energy of the magnitude 7.8 San Francisco earthquake of 1906. That’s enough energy to power the United States for 20 years, based on current needs.

The first-ever sunquake observations are reported in today’s issue of the journal Nature. Alexander G. Kosovichev from Stanford University and Valentina V. Zharkova of Glasgow University in Scotland found signs of the sunquake in data collected by the SOHO spacecraft during a solar flare on July 9, 1996. Twenty minutes after the flare, ripples appeared on the sun’s surface, looking like ripples from a rock dropped into a pool of water. In just one hour, two-mile-high sound waves from the quake traveled 74,567 miles--a distance equivalent to 10 Earth diameters--before they faded.

Compiled by Times medical writer Thomas H. Maugh II