A giant solar tornado - five times the Earth's diameter - swirling at
incredible speed of some 186,000 mph has been captured on video by
NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory.

­This is the first time giant solar twister has been caught on video.

Solar
tornadoes, known as solar prominences, are shaped by the sun's magnetic
field and often occur during coronal mass ejections -- huge explosions
of solar plasma. The speed of swirling solar gases can sometimes reach
several thousand miles per hour.

This 124,000-mile-tall tornado
was filmed on September 25, 2011, but the video was only released to the
public at the National Astronomy Meeting in Manchester (UK) on
Thursday.

Xing Li, an astronomer at Aberystwyth University in
Wales, believes the finding is a "real gem of an event to fire the
imagination, and it is a good way to study magnetic structures in the
sun's atmosphere."

Scientists believe that study of solar
tornadoes will help understand the causes of space storms in general,
which is still one of the great mysteries of our solar system.