Sources Of The High-energy Tail Of Solar Wind
The heliosphere is filled with hot dilute plasma known as solar wind. Due to thermal collisions, the velocity distribution of ions follows a Maxwell distribution. The measured energy spectrum of the ions above the peak at about 1 keV/nucleon, however, is not falling off as rapidly as the Maxwell distribution would predict. Instead, the spectrum exhibits a long high-energy tail extending up to several MeV. The lower energy part of this spectrum (~10 keV – 1 MeV), known as suprathermal...
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