Sunquakes

I did think about an ode to the moon landing ... but there is just a little bit of that going on elsewhere.

But perhaps I should continue the thread of quakes on other heavenly bodies (no, I don't mean Brüno!).

According to a Stanford press release from last year:

"Scientists [my students inexplicably often write "scientist" in this kind of context, when they should use the plural - anyone else ever see that, or know why?] have shown for the first time that solar flares produce seismic waves, and gigantic seismic quakes, in the Sun's interior. Using data from the Michelson Doppler Imager onboard the European Space Agency/NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), Stanford and Glasgow scientists have tracked these seismic waves and found that "sun-quakes" closely resemble earthquakes on our planet.

"The researchers observed a flare-generated solar quake that contained about 40,000 times the energy released in the great earthquake that devastated San Francisco in 1906. The amount of energy released was enough to power the United States for 20 years at its current level of consumption, and was equivalent to an 11.3 magnitude quake on Earth."

Yikes, keep me away from that quake.

I'll be away in Europe on research for a few weeks. I'll be online from time to time, but maybe some of my colleagues would like to do some guest blogging.