Solar wind a major driver of atmospheric sodium at Mercury

No object in the solar system experiences the sun's solar wind more powerfully than Mercury. The planet's magnetic field deflects the sun's stream of electrically charged particles at a distance of only 1,000 kilometers from ...

NASA rocket mission to study the origin of slow solar winds

The Sun's atmosphere, or corona, is beaming with activity. Solar flares and coronal mass injections send high-energy particles out into space and the corona constantly releases particles known as the solar wind.

Image: Auroras viewed from orbit

Auroras make for great Halloween décor over Earth, though ESA astronaut Thomas Pesquet snapped these green smoky swirls of plasma from the International Space Station in August. Also pictured are the Soyuz MS-18 "Yuri Gagarin" ...

Solar storm stirs stunning aurora

After the sun ejected a violent mass of fast-moving plasma into space on 9 October, ESA waited for the storm to strike. A few days later, the coronal mass ejection (CME) arrived at Earth, crashing into our planet's magnetosphere, ...

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