A giant solar tornado five times wider than Earth has been filmed by a NASA spacecraft

NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory captured the tornado twisting across the surface of the sun at speeds of up to 300,000km/h, SPACE.com reports.
"This is perhaps the first time that such a huge solar tornado is filmed by an imager," Xing Li of Aberystwyth University in Wales told the website.
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"Previously, much smaller solar tornadoes were found by the [NASA/European Space Agency] SOHO satellite. But they were not filmed."
The tornado was filmed in September last year but the footage was only made public when Li presented it to the 2012 National Astronomy Meeting in UK's Manchester the other day.
Solar tornados are made up of gases as hot as 2 million degrees Celsius that are shaped and driven by the sun's powerful magnetic field, rather than wind as in Earth's tornados, which reach top speeds of about 480km/h. The sun is currently in an active period of its 11-year weather cycle, which is predicted to peak next year. (Courtesy News 9)
KARACHI: March 30, 2012
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