Issue 55: The Solar Wind

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This edition comprises of a loose collection of related papers marking the start of a nascent research area - how magentic fields extend across vast distances of supposedly ‘empty’ space and affect each other - the Sun affecting the Earth for example. 

I’m trying to find research papers which explain what I think might be happening with the charged particles originating in the upper atmosphere of the sun. I assume that although taken as a whole the solar wind would be electrically neutral. However, there are both positive and negatively charged plasmas. I believe that the positive particles may be of varying mass (that is nuclei with different numbers of protons and neutrons). If this is so then I would guess that the proportion of heavier elements decreases with increasing mass.

Obviously higher energy (plasma-based) charged particles would penetrate deeper through the earth’s magnetic field. Moving charged particles will create an associated magnetic field. Such magnetic fields would interfere with the earth’s magnetic field. Therefore, are we looking at a topology problem? That is, it’s the shape of the resulting magnetic field that would describe what is happening at the poles.