14 Facts About Solar wind

Solar wind is a stream of charged particles released from the upper atmosphere of the Sun, called the corona.

The composition of the solar wind plasma includes a mixture of materials found in the solar plasma: trace amounts of heavy ions and atomic nuclei such as C, N, O, Ne, Mg, Si, S, and Fe.

Solar wind proposed in 1916 that, "From a physical point of view it is most probable that solar rays are neither exclusively negative nor positive rays, but of both kinds"; in other words, the solar wind consists of both negative electrons and positive ions.

In January 1959, the Soviet spacecraft Luna 1 first directly observed the solar wind and measured its strength, using hemispherical ion traps.

The acceleration of the fast Solar wind is still not understood and cannot be fully explained by Parker's theory.

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In 2018, NASA launched the Parker Solar Probe, named in honor of American astrophysicist Eugene Parker, on a mission to study the structure and dynamics of the solar corona, in an attempt to understand the mechanisms that cause particles to be heated and accelerated as solar wind.

The slow solar wind is twice as dense and more variable in nature than the fast solar wind.

Slow solar wind appears to originate from a region around the Sun's equatorial belt that is known as the "streamer belt", where coronal streamers are produced by magnetic flux open to the heliosphere draping over closed magnetic loops.

The Solar wind is considered responsible for comets' tails, along with the Sun's radiation.

The solar wind contributes to fluctuations in celestial radio waves observed on the Earth, through an effect called interplanetary scintillation.

Solar wind is responsible for the overall shape of Earth's magnetosphere.

Solar wind affects other incoming cosmic rays interacting with planetary atmospheres.

The only time the solar wind is observable on the Earth is when it is strong enough to produce phenomena such as the aurora and geomagnetic storms.

Alfven surface is the boundary separating the corona from the solar wind defined as where the coronal plasma's Alfven speed and the large-scale solar wind speed are equal.