[thedoc (OP)]

Wilf James  asked the Naked Scientists:
   
I recently had cause to explain the solar wind to a friend.

The description I gave was almost identical to the description of dark matter that I heard in the 4th July podcast of the National Astonomy Meeting. The solar wind and dark matter have the same attributes. Unless the particles in the solar wind hit something like the atoms in an atmosphere they do not show themselves.

When Eddington checked Einstein's prediction that sun's gravity would bend the light fron a star on the 29th May 1919, the solar wind did not apparently affect his observations. From that I conclude that the solar wind is as invisible as the elusive dark matter.

I have heard that the sun emits a million tonnes of solar wind particles every second. I don't know how long the sun has been emitting particles at this rate but the sun has been in a settled sort of situation for at least 4 billion years of its 4.7 billion years of existence. However one attempts to calculate how much matter the sun has emitted in the time one chooses to use as a reference, it must be a pretty large amount.

Our sun is a relative latecomer as a star in the 13.7 billion years of the existence of the universe. Presumably all comparable stars have emitted comparable amounts of invisible matter for most of the time since the universe began.

Is it possible that at least some of the dark matter is made up of stellar winds?

Wilf James
Letchworth G.C.

What do you think?