In this ultraviolet light video taken by NASA, you can watch a phenomenon that scientists didn't believe could exist until a few months ago. An entire hemisphere of the sun explodes, one region igniting another. What does this discovery mean?


It turns out that the sun doesn't just spurt out gouts of gas in isolated spots. In fact, our star's magnetic field brings many regions of Sol's surface into direct relationships with each other, so areas separated by millions of miles can literally spark each other up. The results are called "sympathetic flares."

According to a release from NASA:



Explosions on the sun are not localized or isolated events, they announced. Instead, solar activity is interconnected by magnetism over breathtaking distances. Solar flares, tsunamis, coronal mass ejections—they can go off all at once, hundreds of thousands of miles apart, in a dizzyingly-complex concert of mayhem.




Read more about this remarkable Great Eruption via NASA.