Solar wind Solar wind The solar wind is a stream of charged particles released from the upper atmosphere of the Sun, called the corona. This plasma consists of mostly electrons, protons and alpha particles with kinetic energy between 0.5 and 10 keV. Embedded within the solar-wind plasma is the interplanetary magnetic field. The solar wind varies in density, temperature and speed over time and over solar latitude and longitude. Its particles can escape the Sun's gravity because of their high energy resulting from the high temperature of the corona, which in turn is a result of the coronal magnetic field. At a
Plasma (physics) first used the word "plasma" in analogy with blood. Mott-Smith recalls, in particular, that the transport of electrons from thermionic filaments reminded Langmuir of "the way blood plasma carries red and white corpuscles and germs." Langmuir described the plasma he observed as follows: Plasma is a state of matter in which an ionised gaseous substance becomes highly electrically conductive to the point that long-range electric and magnetic fields dominate the behaviour of the matter. The plasma state can be contrasted with the other states: solid, liquid, and gas. Plasma is an electrically neutral medium of unbound positive and negative particles