Moment a colossal 74,500-mile-high ‘solar tornado’ swirls on the sun’s surface is captured by NASA

The incredible moment when a colossal “solar tornado” 14 times larger than Earth swirls onto the sun’s surface has been captured by NASA in a new video.

Composed of plasma and heat, the twister was more than 74,500 miles high and moved at 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, of Illinois, said the cyclone had rotated at the sun’s north pole for three days and flung a huge cloud of magnetized gas into space.

Solar tornadoes are created by spiraling magnetic structures rising from the sun and rooted to the solar surface at either end.

When a column of plasma, known as a prominence, shoots up into this structure, it is guided along its spiral 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 said. “It never ends – great.”

The sun has been behaving strangely lately – in February, a piece of the north pole broke off.

A video shows a giant filament of plasma, or electrified gas, shooting out from the sun, breaking up and then circulating in a “massive polar vortex.”

While astronomers are baffled, they speculate that the prominence has something to do with the reversal of the sun’s magnetic field that happens once in the solar cycle.

The video was shared on Twitter by space weather forecaster Tamitha Skov, who said the clip was captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory.

Lasky, of Illinois, said the cyclone had revolved at the sun’s north pole for three days, flinging a huge cloud of magnetized gas into space

The sun has been behaving strangely lately – in February, a piece of the north pole broke off. A video shows a giant filament of plasma, or electrified gas, shooting out from the sun, breaking up and then circulating in a “massive polar vortex”

Talk about polar vortex! Material from a northern prominence has just detached from the main filament and is now circulating in a huge polar vortex around our star’s north pole,” Skov shared in the tweet.

NASA describes solar filaments as clouds of charged particles floating above the sun, attached to them by magnetic forces.

These appear as elongated, uneven strands that shoot out from the surface of the sun.

The prominence mentioned by Skov appears every 11 years exactly at 55 degrees north latitude around the sun’s polar crowns.

Solar physicist Scott McIntosh, the deputy director of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, told Space.com, “Once in each solar cycle, it forms at 55 degrees north latitude and begins to march up toward the solar poles.

‘It’s very curious. There’s a big “why” question surrounding it. Why does it only move towards the pole once and then disappear and then, magically, come back three or four years later in exactly the same area?’

While astronomers have previously observed filaments breaking off from the sun, this is the first time one has circulated through the area in a whirlwind.