Tagged: solar wind

The surface of the sun churns with energy and frequently ejects masses of highly-magnetized plasma towards Earth. Sometimes these ejections are strong enough to crash through the magnetosphere—the natural magnetic shield that protects the Earth—damaging satellites or electrical grids. Such space weather events can be...

High-precision noble gas analyses indicate that solar wind particles from our primordial Sun were encased in the Earth’s core over 4.5 billion years ago. Researchers from the Institute of Earth Sciences at Heidelberg University have concluded that the particles made their way into the overlying...

NASA has selected a science mission planned for launch in 2024 that will sample, analyze, and map particles streaming to Earth from the edges of interstellar space. The Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) mission will help researchers better understand the boundary of the heliosphere,...

Using information from ESA’s Swarm satellite constellation, scientists have made a discovery about how energy generated by electrically-charged particles in the solar wind flows into Earth’s atmosphere—surprisingly, more of it heads towards the magnetic north pole than towards the magnetic south pole. The sun bathes...

The solar wind is a flow of particles that comes off the sun at about one million miles per hour and travels throughout the entire solar system. First proposed in the 1950s by University of Chicago physicist Eugene Parker, the solar wind is visible in...

Solar wind is a continuous stream of charged, subatomic particles emitted by the sun. To humans, the flow is kind of a mixed blessing. The GPS signals we now depend on can get disrupted by solar wind. But solar wind is also a driving mechanism...