A new speed record was recently measured in space. The speed of the solar wind, a thin stream of protons and other charged particles originating from the sun, reached more than 1,850 kilometers per second in October and November last year.
A new speed record was recently measured in space. The speed of the solar wind, a thin stream of protons and other charged particles originating from the sun, reached more than 1,850 kilometers per second in October and November last year.
This speed was measured following two extremely strong solar storms. Solar storms are events where large amounts of hot gas are pushed out of the Sun's outer atmosphere.
It usually takes 48 hours for the particle stream to reach Earth from the Sun. The normal speed of the solar wind is about 400 kilometers per second. In the said case, only about 15 hours passed until the solar wind reached the earth.
To calculate the speed of the solar wind in the two events, scientists from the National Laboratory in Los Alamos and other institutions analyzed data from a proton detector in the spacecraft, which moves around the point where the gravitational forces of the Sun and the Earth balance. The findings were published in the "Research Journal of Geophysical".
