This is an artist's rendering of solar wind coming towards the Earth and its magnetosphere.
Click on image for full size
NASA.
Solar Wind
The Sun is flinging 1 million tons of material out into space every second! We call this material
solar wind. If you add all this material up over the course of a day, it's like the mass of Utah's Great Salt Lake. And this happens every day, day after day, year after year!
We can't see this material coming from the Sun, but we know that it causes:
The solar wind travels very, very fast, and it travels very, very far! The solar wind goes all the way out past Pluto to the
heliopause. There are a few spacecraft like
Ulysses and
Voyager I & II which are helping scientists study solar wind from the Sun all the way out to
Pluto.
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