TENS of thousands of earthquakes are said to happen on our planet each year and the Sun has its own version.
Sunquakes are similar to the events we have here on Earth but they’re much more powerful and they continue to baffle scientists.
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Recent solar flare activity on the Sun has produced some of these sunquakes.
Nasa equipment captured a short clip of a sunquake that happened this week on May 10.
Sunquakes were discovered in 1996 by Dr. Alexander Kosovichev, then at Stanford University.
They appear as circular waves that ripple away from a solar flare as it shoots out of the Sun and into space.
A solar flare is a huge expulsion of plasma from the Sun.
Not all solar flares produce a sunquake, which makes them a bit of a mystery.
Kosovichev helped to capture the recent Nasa attributed footage of the May 10 sunquake.
According to SpaceWeather.com, he said: “We have just detected the first sunquake of Solar Cycle 25.
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“It rippled away from the X1.5-class solar flare of May 10, 2022.”
The footage of the quake is raw so it can be quite difficult to make out the sunquake that’s happening in the middle.
This is something that Kosovichev did on purpose.
He continued: “I wanted people to appreciate how the ripples are nearly overwhelmed by turbulence.
“This is why it took us so long to discover them.”
It’s hoped that understanding the sunquakes could teach us more about the inner workings of the Sun.
Our closest star is currently at the start of a new 11-year solar cycle, which usually sees eruptions and flares grow more intense and extreme.
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This post first appeared on Thesun.co.uk
