Solar tornado spotted - TIME With solar activity currently increasing, and due to peak in 2013, more sunquakes will be observed helping unravel the mechanisms that cause them. NASA / SDO / AIA, EVE / HMI science teams / Zharkov / Green / MSSL / Parker It's one of the all-time great fun facts about space, and you probably learned it in third grade: the planet Jupiter is home to a huge, perpetual hurricane known as the Great Red Spot, so immense that it could swallow up three Earths. That's very old news, though: the Spot may have been spotted as early as 1665, and was seen for sure in 1830. Since the advent of modern telescopes and space probes, astronomers have found angry weather all over the Solar System, including storms on Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Venus. Even Mars, with hardly any atmosphere to speak of, is regularly swept by gigantic dust storms. In short, the idea of tempests on other planets is pretty much a yawn nowadays. But even for the cosmically jaded, a new report out of NASA's orbiting Solar Dynamic Observatory is hard to ignore. On September 25, the spacecraft recorded a mammoth tornado on the sun - a storm five times the width of Earth, reaching high into the solar atmosphere, with winds clocked at a blazing 186,000 m.p.h. "Blazing," in this case, is not a figurative term: the gases entrained in the tornado reached an estimated 2 million degrees Celsius - that's 3.6 million Fahrenheit, although at temperatures like that, the scale hardly matters. The storm lasted at least three hours, and traveled about 125,000 miles (200,000 km) - and there's a movie, the first ever filmed of such a storm, to prove it. PHOTOS: Amazing Photos of the Sun Unlike twisters on Earth, which are born out of roiling air, the solar variety is triggered by intense magnetic storms. In fact, tornadoes on the Sun often show up in the same places as coronal mass ejections, or CME's, the eruptions that send blobs of charged particles out into space - and all too frequently, directly toward our planet. Solar astrophysicists even think the tornadoes may act as triggers for CME's. Now that scientists have filmed one solar tornado, they'll be on the lookout for more. Given the damage coronal mass ejections can wreak on communications networks on Earth, it could pay to have the best possible sense of when the next one might be coming. MORE: Africa Is in the Running to Host the Most Sensitive Radio Telescope MORE: The Sun Erupts: Largest Solar Flare in Four Years to Light Up the Sky