I've seen many sun flares, but I've never seen anything like this video showing several dark plasma tornadoes on the surface of the Sun, captured by the Solar Dynamics Observatory. It's simply mesmerizing and bloody amazing.

An active region rotating into view provides a bright backdrop to the gyrating streams of plasma. The particles are being pulled this way and that by competing magnetic forces. They are tracking along strands of magnetic field lines.


Each frame of the video was captured every four minutes for 30 hours, starting on February 7. According to NASA, this kind of video would have never been possible without SDO up in space, which has now been working for two years now.

I want my desktop image to be an endless slow motion loop of this. [NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory]