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
Relativistic plasma light. (About 10% of protons would have formula_3 at a temperature of 481 MeV - 5.6 TK.) Still higher energies are necessary to achieve a quark–gluon plasma. The primary changes in a plasma's behavior as it approaches the relativistic regime is slight modifications to the equations which describe a non-relativistic plasma and to collision and interaction cross sections. The equations may also need modifications to account for pair production of electron-positron pairs (or other particles at the highest temperatures). A plasma double layer with a large potential drop and layer separation, may accelerate electrons to relativistic velocities, and produce synchrotron