Solar Wind

About:

• Solar wind is a stream of charged particle released from the Sun in all directions at an average speeds of about 400 km/s.
  
  
• The source of these is the Sun’s hot
  
  
• Solar wind is composed of protons as well as electrons whose energies range in between 10 and 100 KeV.
  
  
• It can escape the Sun’s gravity because of:
  • solar winds’ high kinetic energies and
    
    
  • corona’s high temperature due to which the Sun’s gravity cannot get hold of it to pull it down in place.
    
    
  
  
  
• It is not uniform, with its speed varying over different regions of the corona. These high and low speed streams interact with each other, and these variations can produce solar storms in the magnetosphere surrounding Earth.
  
  
• There is a vast bubble called the heliosphere in the interstellar medium which surrounds the solar system. This heliosphere is created by the solar winds.
  
  
• The term Solar wind was coined in 1957 by University of Chicago Professor Eugene Parker, after whom the recent NASA solar probe is named.