Wow!!!
(Movies and images available)

The solar tsunami took place on 19 May 2007, and lasted for about 35 minutes, reaching peak speeds about 20 minutes after the initial blast.

"Co-author David Long, from Trinity College Dublin (TCD), Ireland, commented: "The energy released in these explosions is phenomenal; about two billion times the annual world energy consumption in just a fraction of a second. In half an hour, we saw the tsunami cover almost the full disc of the Sun, nearly a million kilometres away from the epicentre...

His colleague Dr Peter Gallagher, who is also from TCD, said the shockwave moved out exactly like a tsunami on Earth. "A series of troughs and crests in pressure causes it to propagate outwards. But on the Sun, we have hot gas," he explained. "When I’m talking to someone in a room, my voice is carried by pressure waves in the gas that's between us; it's the much the same on the Sun." However, it was not exactly the same, Dr Gallagher added, because on the Sun, magnetic fields also helped the waves along. The phenomenon is therefore known as a magneto-acoustic wave...

"We were able to show for the first time that this wave actually propagates almost all the way from the surface of the Sun to high up in the Sun's atmosphere," said Dr Gallagher.

The researchers even saw the pressure wave bouncing off irregular regions of the Sun’s atmosphere, generating reflections or diffraction patterns - exactly as tsunamis have been observed to do on Earth when they crash against land."

BBC Story

Trinity College of Dublin

Enjoy, Vince