NASA just released an incredible video of a giant wave of explosions on the sun

From Earth, the sun appears as a distant, fuzzy ball of warmth that gives us all life.

But in reality the sun is a violent clump of magnetism and energy, and its surface is constantly erupting and shooting out jets of plasma and radiation.

Now NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory has captured a video of one of these explosions that happened as an arch of plasma collapsed and set off a cascade of flares that twisted and bent around the sun's magnetic field before collapsing back onto the surface.

You can see the explosion happen at the beginning of the clip in the upper right corner:

That explosion likely set off the chain of what are called magnetic arches - bursts of the sun's hot plasma blow off the surface of the sun and twist along sun's magnetic field lines.

You can see them rippling in the middle of the video like a giant wave washing over the sun. There's a minor glitch that happens in the middle of the video:

The arches glow as they emit ultraviolet light, which normally isn't visible to the human eye, but NASA has colored it bronze in the video.

Every once in a while, the sun will unleash a particularly powerful burst of solar material. Sometimes these are so intense that they leave the sun, barrel through space, and pummel objects in their path with hot plasma and radiation.

Luckily the explosion in the video happened back in December and didn't cause any damage, since the solar material collapsed back onto the sun's surface.

NASA and government officials are working on a plan that will protect Earth should one of these huge bursts of energy ever head directly for Earth. A big enough blast could fry power grids and knock out communication systems.

You can watch the whole cascade in the video below: