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 acceleration an equal mix of electrons and ions in equilibrium. However, if a strong enough external electric or electromagnetic field is applied, the plasma electrons, which are very light in comparison to the background ions (by a factor of 1836), will separate spatially from the massive ions creating a charge imbalance in the perturbed region. A particle injected into such a plasma would be accelerated by the charge separation field, but since the magnitude of this separation is generally similar to that of the external field, apparently nothing is gained in comparison to a conventional system that simply applies the field