Massive sun explosion revealed stunning five year time lapse

USA: NASA has released a mesmerising time-lapse showing the Sun exploding and erupting over the course of five years.

The video marks the fifth anniversary of the Solar Dynamics Observatory, which captures highly detailed images of the Sun almost once per second, for 24 hours of the day.

It shows the swirling, belching surface of the Sun, with giant clouds of solar material being hurled outwards.

These solar flares are bursts of light, energy and x-rays.

They are sometimes accompanied by a rude-sounding "coronal mass ejection", which causes the spurts of solar material to escape the surface of the Sun and head off into space.

You can also see huge sunspots growing and shrinking.

The SDO watches the Sun in different wavelengths to monitor the different temperatures on the surface and to try and work out what causes the dramatic eruptions. These are represented by different colours in the video.

The Observatory is also trying to work out what makes the Sun's atmosphere - the corona - up to 1,000 times hotter than the surface and why the star's magnetic fields shift so much.