The sun is a giant ball of gas with temperatures ranging from a few thousand to millions of degrees. Occasionally, there are solar flares that can cause northern lights on Earth, changes in satellite orbits or blackouts. However, these eruptions also affect the sun itself: They change the atmosphere of the sun and occasionally also cause solar quakes. The solar quakes, discovered only in 1998, look like waves spreading out in circles on the surface – similar to the view of throwing a rock into a lake.

Much less is known about solar quakes than about earthquakes, it is not even known whether they are triggered above or below the surface. They have a few dozen times more energy than the largest earthquakes ever observed and move up to 20 times faster. To this day, it remains a mystery why they only occur during certain solar flares.