NASA Captures Footage Of Gigantic Sun Tornado

Tornadoes on Earth got nothing on this furious funnel. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory captured footage of a "complex mass of plasma" on the sun that gyrated at a temperature of 5 million degrees Fahrenheit.

William Pesnell, SDO project scientist, told The Huffington Post that the material in a solar tornado moves at about 10,000 mph.

The tornado lasted 40 hours from Sept. 1 to Sept. 3 above the sun's surface, the observatory noted. "It was stretched and pulled back and forth by powerful magnetic forces but not ripped apart in this sequence," according to the SDO website. "The temperature of the ionized iron particles observed in this extreme ultraviolet wavelength of light was about 2.8 million degrees [Celsius]. "

In 2012, the Solar Dynamics Observatory filmed a solar tornado that also dwarfed Earth. That cyclone reportedly reached temperatures between 90,000 and 3.6 million degrees F.

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