Billion-Degree Cloud Around Earth

texchanchan writes "From a report on Yahoo: 'The Earth's outer atmosphere works as a heat shield to deflect and absorb some of the damaging energy [of solar wind], but in the process creates a billion-degree cloud of electrified gas that sets up loops of multimillion amp electric current.' That's pretty wild to be going on over our heads. Researched at NASA's IMAGE project. Here's the press release, with links to movies of the electrical excitement."

Comments

What is a degree?

[fava]

What we know as temperature is actually a measure of the average kenetic energy of all the molecules in our sample, in other words its a measure of average speed.

What a billion degrees means is the molecules are moving very fast, however because there are so few of them the total effect is minimal.