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A stellar wind is a flow of gas ejected from the upper atmosphere of a
A stellar wind is a flow of gas ejected from the upper atmosphere of a star
A star is an astronomical object comprising a luminous spheroid of plasma held together by its gravity. The nearest star to Earth is the Sun. Many other stars are visible to the naked eye at night, but their immense distances from Earth make ...
. It is distinguished from the bipolar outflows characteristic of young stars by being less collimated, although stellar winds are not generally spherically symmetric.
Different types of stars have different types of stellar winds.
Post- main-sequence star
A star is an astronomical object comprising a luminous spheroid of plasma held together by its gravity. The nearest star to Earth is the Sun. Many other stars are visible to the naked eye at night, but their immense distances from Earth make ...
s nearing the ends of their lives often eject large quantities of mass in massive ( solar masses per year), slow (v = 10 km/s) winds. These include red giants and supergiants, and asymptotic giant branch
The asymptotic giant branch (AGB) is a region of the Hertzsprung–Russell diagram populated by evolved cool luminous stars. This is a period of stellar evolution undertaken by all low- to intermediate-mass stars (about 0.5 to 8 solar masses) lat ...
stars. These winds are understood to be driven by radiation pressure on dust
Dust is made of fine particles of solid matter. On Earth, it generally consists of particles in the atmosphere that come from various sources such as soil lifted by wind (an aeolian process), volcanic eruptions, and pollution. Dust in ...
condensing in the upper atmosphere of the stars.
Young T Tauri stars often have very powerful stellar winds.
Massive stars of types O and B have stellar winds with lower mass loss rates ( solar masses per year) but very high velocities (v > 1–2000 km/s). Such winds are driven by radiation