Solar Wind
Posted: Fri Aug 31, 2012 7:46 am
"Solar Wind"
I became interested in reading more about comets and learned the tail of a comet is always pointed away from the comet. Interested in learning more about why, I discovered an interesting story. Eugene Parker created this crazy idea that the sun created a solar storm of particles through out the solar system he termed as "Solar Wind". His crazy ideas included outer coronal atmospheres that escaped the suns atmosphere supersonically into interstellar space. Opposition to Parker's hypothesis solar wind was strong, and his papers on the subject where rejected from notable scientific publication.
5 years later Luna 1 directly observed solar wind validating Parkers hypothesis but also measuring it being much stronger then even Parker had originally given it credit. It's this same Solar Wind that constantly pushes those tails away from the sun, but constantly bombards the entire solar system with a stream of charged particles mostly consists of electrons and protons with energies between 1.5 and 10 keV.
I could not find any studies or data that discuss how much of this solar wind / radiation penetrates the earth.
I became interested in reading more about comets and learned the tail of a comet is always pointed away from the comet. Interested in learning more about why, I discovered an interesting story. Eugene Parker created this crazy idea that the sun created a solar storm of particles through out the solar system he termed as "Solar Wind". His crazy ideas included outer coronal atmospheres that escaped the suns atmosphere supersonically into interstellar space. Opposition to Parker's hypothesis solar wind was strong, and his papers on the subject where rejected from notable scientific publication.
5 years later Luna 1 directly observed solar wind validating Parkers hypothesis but also measuring it being much stronger then even Parker had originally given it credit. It's this same Solar Wind that constantly pushes those tails away from the sun, but constantly bombards the entire solar system with a stream of charged particles mostly consists of electrons and protons with energies between 1.5 and 10 keV.
I could not find any studies or data that discuss how much of this solar wind / radiation penetrates the earth.