NASA's spaceship captures a gigantic Solar Tornado on Film

It's one of the great fun information about space, and you may be educated it in third grade: the planet Jupiter is home to a massive, long-lasting cyclone known as the Great Red Spot, so massive that it could swallow up three Earths. The Spot may have been covered as early as 1665 and was seen for in no doubt in 1830. Since the arrival of recent telescopes and space probes, astronomers have found heated weather conditions all over the solar system, as well as storms on Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Venus. Even Mars, with hardly any environment to articulate of, is repeatedly swept by extremely large dust storms. 

In short, the idea of tempests on other planets is attractive much a yawn these days. But even for the cosmically fed-up, new information out of NASA's orbiting Solar Dynamics Observatory is tough to ignore. On Sept. 25, the spaceship recorded a huge storm on the sun - a storm five times the width of Earth, reaching high into the solar atmosphere, with winds clocked at a burning 300,000 km/h (186,000 m.p.h.). “Burning," in this case, is not literal term: the gases entrained in the storm reached a probably 2,000,000°C - that's 3,600,000°F, even though at temperatures like that, the degree only just matters. The tornado lasted at least 3 hours, and traveled about 200,000 km (125,000 miles) - and there's a movie, the first ever filmed of such a storm, to prove it. 

Unlike twisters on Earth, which are natural out of roiling manner, the solar variety is triggered by powerful attractive storms. In fact, tornadoes on the sun often show up in the same places as coronal mass ejections, or CMEs, the eruptions that send blobs of electric particles out into space - and all too regularly, straight toward our planet. Solar astrophysicists even think the tornadoes may well perform as triggers for CMEs. 

Now that scientists have filmed one solar storm, they'll be on bewaring for more. Given the damage CMEs can cause on interactions networks on Earth, it could pay to have the best potential sense of when the next one might be coming.