17TH FEBRUARY 2012.. A tremendous tornado whirling across the surface of the sun was captured by a NASA satellite recently -- an amazing wonder of the solar system that may be as big as the Earth itself. The video was recorded by the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), a sun-watching satellite that has transmitted a series of stunning photos of solar flares in recent months. The new video shows darker, cooler plasma shifting back and forth above the sun’s surface over the span of nearly 30 hours stretching from Feb. 7 to Feb. 8. And the giant tornado may be as large as the Earth itself, with gusts of up to 300000 mph, explained Terry Kucera, deputy SOHO project scientist and a solar physicist with NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. "It’s about 15000 degrees Fahrenheit -- relatively cool," Kucera told FoxNews.com. After all, the sun’s corona is a whopping 2 million degrees, she explained. Such tornadoes (Kucera classed it a "solar prominence") have been known of for decades; the European Space Agency’s SOHO spacecraft captured evidence of them as early as 1996, mainly near the Sun’s north and south poles at the time. And though they resemble their cousins here on Earth, they’re created entirely differently, Kucera said -- through magnetism, not pressure and temperature fluctuations. "Those motions you see, it’s all just moving along the magnetic field somehow -- but we’re still looking to understand what’s happening with these things," Kucera said. The storm was created by <b>...</b> Less