Some rather sensational headlines have come out this past week about a huge chunk of the sun breaking off and creating a tornado-like vortex. No piece of the sun actually broke off. What really happened was a quite common occurrence — a long filament of plasma called a prominence shot out of the surface of the sun. What made it an unusual event according to a tweet by Dr. Tamitha Skov is the filament detached and circulated around the north pole of the sun. Fortunately for us, this intriguing solar activity did not send a coronal mass ejection toward Earth, where it could potentially cause power-grid failures as well as damage satellites.