Solar phenomena move about and can travel at a few hundred meters per second when they first appear. The solar wind is a stream of plasma released from the Sun's upper atmosphere. It consists of mostly electrons and protons with energies usually between 1.5 and 10 keV. The stream of particles varies in density, temperature and speed over time and over solar longitude. These particles can escape the Sun's gravity because of their high energy. The solar wind is divided into the slow solar wind and the fast solar wind. The slow solar wind has a velocity of about , a temperature
Plasma (physics) describes the behaviour of the Ionised atomic nuclei and the electrons within the surrounding region of the plasma. Very simply, each of these nuclei are suspended in a movable sea of electrons. Plasma was first identified in a Crookes tube, and so described by Sir William Crookes in 1879 (he called it "radiant matter"). The nature of this "cathode ray" matter was subsequently identified by British physicist Sir J.J. Thomson in 1897. The term "plasma" was coined by Irving Langmuir in 1928. Lewi Tonks and Harold Mott-Smith, both of whom worked with Irving Langmuir in the 1920s, recall that Langmuir