What is Solar Wind and why does it make planets without magnetic fields uninhabitable?
In: Physics
Solar wind is all of the electrons, protons, and radiation particles that the sun gives off. As the sun does its regular thing of fusing hydrogen and helium, there is not only lots of light being created, but all of those “explosions” are also flinging LOTS of stuff away from the sun at really high speed and with a ton of energy.
All of this stuff is electromagnetically charged, which means that if a planet has a magnetic field, the solar wind just kind of bounces off of it and moves on. When a planet has no magnetic field, the stuff can hit the surface and damage things. When radiation that strong hits living things, it tends to do way too much damage for them to continue living.
The solar wind is a stream of highly energetic, electrically charged particles released from the sun’s upper atmosphere as part of its nuclear processes.
The issue with this is that, in the absence of a magnetic field, it’ll start tearing the atmosphere away from a planet, and then bathing the planet’s surface in radiation, both of which are very bad.
The sun radiates solar wind and it contains radioactive particles. Without a shield (magnetic field), the planet’s life forms will be irradiated and killed.
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