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
Nonthermal plasma Nonthermal plasma A nonthermal plasma, cold plasma or non-equilibrium plasma is a plasma which is not in thermodynamic equilibrium, because the electron temperature is much hotter than the temperature of heavy species (ions and neutrals). As only electrons are thermalized, their Maxwell-Boltzmann velocity distribution is very different than the ion velocity distribution. When one of the velocities of a species does not follow a Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution, the plasma is said to be non-Maxwellian. A kind of common nonthermal plasma is the mercury-vapor gas within a fluorescent lamp, where the "electron gas" reaches a temperature of while the rest of the