solar wind

solar wind

solar wind, stream of ionized hydrogen—protons and electrons—with an 8% component of helium ions and trace amounts of heavier ions that radiates outward from the sun at high speeds. The continuous expansion of the solar corona into the surrounding vacuum of space carries away from the sun about 1 million tons of gas per sec; this blows out like a wind through the solar system. During the days of quiet sunspot activity the wind at the sun has an approximate density of 1 billion atoms per cc and a temperature of about 1 million degrees Fahrenheit. During relatively quiet periods, the wind moves outward from the sun at velocities of 220 to 440 mi (350 to 700 km) per sec (averaging about 1 million mph/1.6 million kph). Near the earth it has a density ranging from 3 to 6 atoms per cc, a velocity of 450 mi (700 km) per sec, and a temperature of about 1,300°F; (700°C;); during periods of greater sunspot activity it shows corresponding increases in density, temperature, and velocity—reaching speeds of 2 million mph (3.2 million kph). The increased velocity is attributed to acceleration caused by magnetic waves spiraling from the sun. The wind is believed to extend out to between 100 and 200 AU (1 AU is the mean distance between the earth and the sun), far beyond Pluto (at 39 AU), where it is dispersed in the interstellar gases.

Many effects result from the solar wind. The characteristic that a comet tail always points away from the sun is explained by the pressure of the wind pushing it out. The intensity of the cosmic rays in the inner part of the solar system is reduced by the magnetic fields carried on the wind, which tend to deflect the rays, thus providing a shield against that radiation. The interaction of the wind with the earth's magnetic field is responsible in part for such phenomena as auroras and geomagnetic storms.

See J. R. Jokipii and C. P. Sonett, ed., Cosmic Winds and the Heliosphere (1997).

Flux of particles, chiefly protons, electrons, and helium nuclei, accelerated by the hot solar corona's high temperatures to speeds high enough to allow them to escape the Sun. Solar flares increase its intensity. The solar wind deflects planets' magnetospheres and the ion tails of comets away from the Sun. The uninterrupted portion of the solar wind continues to travel to a distance of about 110–170 astronomical units, where it cools and eventually diffuses into interstellar space. Seealso heliopause.

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The solar wind is a stream of charged particles—a plasma—that are ejected from the upper atmosphere of the sun. It consists mostly of electrons and protons with energies of about 1 keV. These particles are able to escape the sun's gravity, in part because of the high temperature of the corona, but also because of high kinetic energy that particles gain through a process that is not well-understood at this time.



The concept of streams of particles flowing outward from the Sun was first suggested by British amateur astronomer Richard C. Carrington. In 1859, Carrington and Richard Hodgson independently made the first observation of what would later be called a solar flare. This is a sudden outburst of energy from the Sun's atmosphere. On the following day, a geomagnetic storm was observed, and Carrington suspected that there may be a connection. George Fitzgerald later suggested that matter was being regularly accelerated away from the Sun and was reaching the Earth after several days.

The ideas of Fitzgerald and others was further developed by the Norwegian physicist Kristian Birkeland. His geomagnetic surveys showed that auroral activity was nearly permanent. As these displays and other geomagnetic activity were being produced by particles from the Sun, he concluded that the Earth was being continually bombarded by "rays of electric corpuscles emitted by the Sun". In 1916, Birkeland was probably the first person to successfully predict 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. Three years later in 1919, Frederick Lindemann also suggested that particles of both polarities, protons as well as electrons, come from the Sun.

Around the 1930s, scientists had determined that the temperature of the solar corona must be a million degrees Celsius because of the way it stood out into space (as seen during total eclipses). Later spectroscopic work confirmed this extraordinary temperature. In the mid-1950s the British mathematician Sydney Chapman calculated the properties of a gas at such a temperature and determined it was such a superb conductor of heat that it must extend way out into space, beyond the orbit of Earth. Also in the 1950s, a German scientist named Ludwig Biermann became interested in the fact that no matter whether a comet is headed towards or away from the sun, its tail always points away from the Sun. Biermann postulated that this happens because the Sun emits a steady stream of particles that pushes the comet's tail away.

Wilfried Schröder claims in his book, Who First Discovered the Solar Wind?, that the German astronomer Paul Ahnert was the first to relate solar wind to comet tail direction based on observations of the comet Whipple-Fedke (1942g).

Eugene Parker realised that the heat flowing from the sun in Chapman's model and the comet tail blowing away from the sun in Biermann's hypothesis had to be the result of the same phenomenon, which he termed the "solar wind". Parker showed that even though the sun's corona is strongly attracted by solar gravity, it is such a good conductor of heat that it is still very hot at large distances. Since gravity weakens as distance from the sun increases, the outer coronal atmosphere escapes supersonically into interstellar space. Furthermore, Parker was the first person to notice that the weakening effect of the gravity has the same effect on hydrodynamic flow as a de Laval nozzle: it incites a transition from subsonic to supersonic flow.

Opposition to Parker's hypothesis on the solar wind was strong. The paper he submitted to the Astrophysical Journal in 1958 was rejected by two reviewers. It was saved by the editor Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (who later received the 1983 Nobel Prize in physics).

In January 1959, the first ever direct observations and measurements of strength of the solar wind were made by the Soviet satellite Luna 1. They were performed using scintillation counters and gaseous ionization detectors. The discovery, made by Konstantin Gringauz was verified by Luna 2, Luna 3 and by the more distant measurements of Venera 1. Three years later its measurement was performed by Americans (Neugebauer and collaborators) using the Mariner 2 spacecraft.

However, the acceleration of the fast wind is still not understood and cannot be fully explained by Parker's theory. The first numerical simulation of the solar wind in the solar corona including closed and open field lines was performed by Pneuman and Knopp in 1971. The magnetohydrodynamics equations in steady state were solved iteratively starting with an initial dipolar configuration.

In the late 1990s the Ultraviolet Coronal Spectrometer (UVCS) instrument on board the SOHO spacecraft observed the acceleration region of the fast solar wind emanating from the poles of the sun, and found that the wind accelerates much faster than can be accounted for by thermodynamic expansion alone. Parker's model predicted that the wind should make the transition to supersonic flow at an altitude of about 4 solar radii from the photosphere; but the transition (or "sonic point") now appears to be much lower, perhaps only 1 solar radius above the photosphere, suggesting that some additional mechanism accelerates the solar wind away from the sun.

In 1990, the Ulysses probe was launched to study the solar wind from high solar lattitudes. All prior observations had been made at or near the solar system's ecliptic plane.


While early models of the solar wind used primarily thermal energy to accelerate the material, by the 1960s it was clear that thermal acceleration alone cannot account for the high speed of solar wind. An additional unknown acceleration mechanism is required, and likely relates to magnetic fields in the solar atmosphere.

The Sun's corona, or extended outer layer, is a region of plasma that is heated to over a million Celsius. As a result of thermal collisions, the particles within the inner corona have a range and distribution of speeds described by a Maxwellian distribution. The mean velocity of these particles is about 145 km/s, which is well below the solar escape velocity of 618 km/s. However, a few of the particles will achieve energies sufficient to reach the terminal velocity of 400 km/s, allowing them to feed the solar wind. At the same temperature, electrons, due to their much smaller mass, obtain escape velocity and build up an electric field which tends to further accelerate ions - charged atoms - away from the Sun.

The total number of particles carried away from the Sun by the solar wind is about 1.3 per second. Thus, the total mass loss each year is about (2–3) solar masses, or 6.7 billion tons per hour. This is equivalent to losing a mass equal to the Earth every 150 million years. However, only about 0.01% of the Sun's total mass has been lost through the solar wind. Other stars have much stronger stellar winds that result in significantly higher mass loss rates.


The solar wind is divided into two components, respectively termed the slow solar wind and the fast solar wind. The slow solar wind has a velocity of about 400 km/s, a temperature of 1.4–1.6 K and a composition that is a close match to the corona. By contrast, the fast solar wind has a typical velocity of 750 km/s, a temperature of 8 K and it nearly matches the composition of the Sun's photosphere. The slow solar wind is twice as dense and more variable in intensity than the fast solar wind. The slow wind also has a more complex structure, with turbulent regions and large-scale structures.



Coronal mass ejection

Both the fast and slow solar wind can be interrupted by large, fast-moving bursts of plasma called interplanetary coronal mass ejections, or ICMEs. ICMEs are the interplanetary manifestation of solar coronal mass ejections, which are caused by release of magnetic energy at the sun. ICMEs are often called "solar storms" or "space storms" in the popular media. They are sometimes, but not always, associated with solar flares, which are another manifestation of magnetic energy release at the Sun. ICMEs cause shock waves in the thin plasma of the heliosphere, launching electromagnetic waves and accelerating particles (mostly protons and electrons) to form showers of ionizing radiation that precede the ICME.

When an ICME impacts the Earth's magnetosphere, it temporarily deforms the Earth's magnetic field, changing the direction of compass needles and inducing large electrical ground currents in Earth itself; this is called a geomagnetic storm and it is a global phenomenon. ICME impacts can induce magnetic reconnection in Earth's magnetotail (the midnight side of the magnetosphere); this launches protons and electrons downward toward Earth's atmosphere, where they form the aurora.

ICMEs are not the only cause of space weather. Different patches on the Sun are known to give rise to slightly different speeds and densities of wind depending on local conditions. In isolation, each of these different wind streams would form a spiral with a slightly different angle, with fast-moving streams moving out more directly and slow-moving streams wrapping more around the sun. Faster-moving streams tend to overtake slower streams that originate westward of them on the sun, forming turbulent co-rotating interaction regions that give rise to wave motions and accelerated particles, and that affect Earth's magnetosphere in the same way as, but more gently than, ICMEs.

Effect on the Solar System

Over the lifetime of the Sun, the surface rotation rate has decreased significantly. This loss of rotation is thought to have been caused by interaction of the Sun's surface layers with the escaping solar wind.


As the solar wind approaches a planet that has a well-developed magnetic field (such as Earth, Jupiter and Saturn), the particles are deflected by the Lorentz force. This region, known as the magnetosphere, causes the particles to travel around the planet rather than bombarding the atmosphere or surface. The magnetosphere is roughly shaped like a hemisphere on the side facing the Sun, then is drawn out in a long wake on the opposite side. The boundary of this region is called the magnetopause, and some of the particles are able to penetrate the magnetosphere through this region by partial reconnection of the magnetic field lines.

Earth itself is largely protected from the solar wind by its magnetic field, which deflects most of the charged particles, however some of the charged particles are trapped in the Van Allen radiation belt. A smaller number of particles from the solar wind manage to travel, as though on an electromagnetic energy transmission line, to the Earth's upper atmosphere and ionosphere in the auroral zones. 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. Bright auroras strongly heat the ionosphere, causing its plasma to expand into the magnetosphere, increasing the size of the plasma geosphere, and causing escape of atmospheric matter into the solar wind. Geomagnetic storms result when the pressure of plasmas contained inside the magnetosphere is sufficiently large to inflate and thereby distort the geomagnetic field.

The solar wind is responsible for the overall shape of Earth's magnetosphere, and fluctuations in its speed, density, direction, and entrained magnetic field strongly affect Earth's local space environment. For example, the levels of ionizing radiation and radio interference can vary by factors of hundreds to thousands; and the shape and location of the magnetopause and bow shock wave upstream of it can change by several Earth radii, exposing geosynchronous satellites to the direct solar wind. These phenomena are collectively called space weather.



Venus, the nearest planet to Earth, has an atmosphere 100 times more dense than our own. Modern space probes have discovered a comet-like tail that stretches back to the orbit of the Earth.

Mars is larger than Mercury and four times farther from the sun, and yet even here it is thought that the solar wind has stripped away up to a third of its original atmosphere, leaving a layer 100 times less dense than the Earth's.

Planetary surfaces

Mercury, the nearest planet to the Sun, bears the full brunt of the solar wind, and its atmosphere is vestigial and transient, its surface bathed in radiation.

The Earth's Moon has no atmosphere or intrinsic magnetic field, and consequently its surface is bombarded with the full solar wind. The Project Apollo missions deployed passive aluminum collectors in an attempt to sample the solar wind, and lunar soil returned for study confirmed that the lunar regolith is enriched in atomic nuclei deposited from the solar wind. There has been speculation that these elements may prove to be useful resources for future lunar colonies.

Outer limits

The solar wind "blows a bubble" in the interstellar medium (the rarefied hydrogen and helium gas that permeates the galaxy). The point where the solar wind's strength is no longer great enough to push back the interstellar medium is known as the heliopause, and is often considered to be the outer "border" of the solar system. The distance to the heliopause is not precisely known, and probably varies widely depending on the current velocity of the solar wind and the local density of the interstellar medium, but it is known to lie far outside the orbit of Pluto. Scientists hope to gain more perspective on the heliopause from data acquired through the Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) mission, to be launched in 2008.

See also


External links

  • Sun|trek website An educational resource for teachers and students about the Sun and its effect on the Earth

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