Accuweather.com - 5/6/13, Mark Paquette

The solar wind? What is it? It is a charged stream of particles released form the upper atmosphere of the sun. These particles escape the sun's gravity through kinetic energy by high temperature of the corona (the outer atmosphere).

Solar wind creates the heliosphere, the huge bubble in interstellar space. The heliopshere surrounds the entire solar system. Solar wind also creates geomagnetic storms, aurora (known as the northern and southern lights), and plasma tails of comets. Solar wind in a nutshell is plasma.

We will not get into the most detailed aspects of solar wind, what it is, what it does, how it affects every planet in the solar. What we will try to do here is break it down and make it fairly easy to understand.