Kowabunga Dude! = Tsunami on the Sun.

[Squink]

A Large Tsunami Shock Wave on the Sun
To scale, the earth would appear about the size of a pencil eraser.

The solar tsunami spread at nearly one million kilometers per hour, and circled the entire Sun in a matter of minutes.

Studied once, for twenty minutes in the 1960’s:

The phenomenon of Moreton waves was first reported in 1960 from the legendary Lockheed Observatory. Y. Uchida in his 1968-1974 papers nicely explained Moreton waves as the intersection of coronal shock waves (due to a flare) with the chromosphere. But since then there had been surprisingly few follow-up studies

[Jake]

Thanks for the photo, Squink. Photographs of the Sun always amaze me.
Such tremendous power!

[Triskadecamus]

Yo. Surf is Waaaay up!

One of my favorite web sites.

Tris

[Mindfield]

Dayum. A million clicks an hour. That’s, like, way faster than a Bugatti Veryon.

[nitpick] The article states that the sunspot (pictured) that produced the tsunami was “Earth-sized.” [/nitpick]

Seriously, astronomy fascinates the hell out me, and all the recent research about the Sun has been incredible with all the close-ups and such. I’d never seen anything like that, and it’s both incredible and rather frightening.

[Kythereia]

Can you imagine one day having the technology to actually surf on the sun’s surface?

That would be so awesome.

[Dr.Rieux]

You just know the Silver Surfer was riding that wave!