Watch: 2.8-million-degree tornado swirls on surface of sun

Sunday, September 13, 2015, 12:30 PM - Tornadoes are scary enough without factoring in a 40-hour lifespan and a temperature of 2.8 million degrees Celsius.

From Sept. 1 to Sept. 3, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) captured shots of a solar ‘tornado’ swirling along the surface of the sun. The images have been transformed into a time-lapse video.

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"It was stretched and pulled back and forth by powerful magnetic forces, but not ripped apart in this sequence," the SDO’s website notes.

The tornado spun over the course of 40 hours, and SDO members are referring to it as a "small but complex mass of plasma.".

But this month's solar spectacle isn't the first of its kind -- last year a NASA spacecraft captured video of a different solar tornado spiraling on the sun.

In 2011 a solar tornado five times the size of Earth span at speeds of up to 300,000 km/h. As Space.com notes, the intensity of solar tornado speeds can be seen when compared to the speed of tornadoes on Earth, which reach up to 480 km/h.

Sources: Solar Dynamics Observatory | Space.com

Thumbnail image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.