Moment a colossal 74,500-mile-high 'solar tornado' swirls on the sun's surface ... trends now
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The incredible moment a colossal 'solar tornado' that is 14 times larger than Earth swirls on the sun's surface has been captured by NASA in a new video.
The twister, composed of plasma and heat, measured more than 74,500 miles high and moved up to 310,000 miles per hour.
The cosmic show was spotted by astrophotographer Apollo Lasky, who used images from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory to create the amazing video.
Lasky, from Illinois, said the cyclone had been twisting on the sun's North Pole for three days, hurling a massive cloud of magnetized gas into space.
The cosmic show was spotted by astrophotographer Apollo Lasky, who used images from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory to create the amazing video
Solar tornadoes occur due to spiral-shaped magnetic structures that rise from the sun and are rooted to the solar surface at both ends.
When a column of plasma, known as a prominence, shoots up inside this structure, it is guided along its helical magnetic field, causing the plasma to rotate and form a twister.
'I've never seen anything like it in all my years of watching the sun,' Lasky shared. 'It never stops -amazing.'
The sun has been experiencing bizarre behavior recently - in February, a piece of its northern
