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
Baryon acoustic oscillations interacting with the plasma via Thomson scattering. As the universe expanded, the plasma cooled to below 3000 K—a low enough energy such that the electrons and protons in the plasma could combine to form neutral hydrogen atoms. This recombination happened when the universe was around 379,000 years old, or at a redshift of . Photons interact to a much lesser degree with neutral matter, and therefore at recombination the universe became transparent to photons, allowing them to decouple from the matter and free-stream through the universe. Technically speaking, the mean free path of the photons became of order the size