Dibyendu Chakrabarty

October 10, 2024. The Sun hurled a cloud of magnetized plasma toward Earth, and four spacecraft, stationed at a single point between the Sun and Earth, simultaneously recorded how that cloud churned. The distance between the outermost probes was just 80 Earth radii, about half a million kilometers.

The solar wind is a continuous stream of charged particles flowing from the Sun. It has two main components: protons (hydrogen nuclei) and alpha particles (helium nuclei, four times heavier).