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The Sun's wind is called the solar wind. These winds consist mostly of high-energy electrons and protons (about 1 keV) that are able to escape the star's gravity because of the high temperature of the corona. Stellar winds from main-sequence stars do not strongly influence the evolution of lower-mass stars such as the Sun.
The latitude ranges for the Roaring Forties and similar winds are not consistent: all shift towards the South Pole in the southern summer, and towards the Equator in the southern winter. [2] Wellington, the capital of New Zealand, is known as "Windy Welly" because it is one of the few cities situated in these gusty latitudes. [6]
The solar wind is supersonic and passes through a bow shock where the direction of flow is changed so that most of the solar wind plasma is deflected to either side of the magnetopause, much like water is deflected before the bow of a ship. The zone of shocked solar wind plasma is the magnetosheath. At Earth and all the other planets with ...
The heliosphere blown by the solar wind, within which all the major planets of the Solar System are embedded, is a small example of a stellar-wind bubble. Stellar-wind bubbles have a two-shock structure. [1] The freely-expanding stellar wind hits an inner termination shock, where its kinetic energy is thermalized, producing 10 6 K, X-ray ...
Wind is the natural movement of air or other gases relative to a planet's surface. Winds occur on a range of scales, from thunderstorm flows lasting tens of minutes, to local breezes generated by heating of land surfaces and lasting a few hours, to global winds resulting from the difference in absorption of solar energy between the climate ...
Bow shock occurs when the magnetosphere of an astrophysical object interacts with the nearby flowing ambient plasma such as the solar wind. For Earth and other magnetized planets, it is the boundary at which the speed of the stellar wind abruptly drops as a result of its approach to the magnetopause.
For instance, on Venus, the interaction of thermal tides with planetary-scale Rossby waves is thought to contribute significantly to its rapid super-rotational winds. Similarly, in Earth's atmosphere, Kelvin waves generate eastward along the equator, playing a vital role in phenomena like the El Niño-Southern Oscillation , demonstrating the ...
Typically, due to aerodynamic drag, there is a wind gradient in the wind flow ~100 meters above the Earth's surface—the surface layer of the planetary boundary layer. Wind speed increases with increasing height above the ground, starting from zero [4] due to the no-slip condition. [5]