A suite of NASA's sun-gazing spacecraft have spotted an unusual series of eruptions in which a series of fast puffs forced the slow ejection of a massive burst of solar material from the sun's atmosphere. "Looking at the corona in extreme ultraviolet light we see the source of the puffs is a series of energetic jets and related flares," said Nathalia Alzate, a solar scientist at the University of Aberystwyth in Wales. "The jets are localized, catastrophic releases of energy that spew material out from the sun into space. These rapid changes in the magnetic field cause flares, which release a huge amount of energy in a very short time in the form of super-heated plasma, high-energy radiation and radio bursts."