5-Million-Degree Plasma 'Tornado' Rages on the Sun (Video)

A giant, swirling plume of superheated plasma churned above the surface of the sun for 40 hours last week while a NASA spacecraft looked on. NASA's sun-studying Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) captured dramatic time-lapse video of the solar tornado, which raged from Sept. 1 through Sept. 3. The mass of plasma "was stretched and pulled back and forth by powerful magnetic forces but [was] not ripped apart in this sequence," SDO team members wrote in a description of the video.