Why is there no wind in space?
Wind is air on the move, and space has almost no air, so ordinary wind cannot exist there. Except space is full of a very different wind, made of something else entirely, moving faster than any storm on Earth.
4 min read
Wind on Earth is air rushing from where it is pressed together tightly to where it is not. Take the air away and there is nothing left to rush. That is the short answer for why space has no wind. It is also not the whole answer.
Wind is something a fluid does
The same rule explains why there is no sound in space either: both are patterns that matter makes, not things that can exist on their own. Remove almost all the matter, and both the sound and the wind it might have carried disappear together.
Where Earth's air actually runs out
There is no wall where the atmosphere ends. Air just keeps thinning with height until there is too little left to matter. Most of the world treats 100 km up, the Kármán line, as the agreed edge of space. Above it, there is nowhere near enough air left to feel as wind, no matter how fast anything is moving.
The wind that actually is out there
Space is not empty of everything, though. The Sun constantly throws off a stream of charged particles from its outer atmosphere, called the solar wind. It is mostly protons and electrons, and it travels at 250 to 750 km/s, hundreds of times faster than the strongest hurricane on Earth.
Why it still matters
When solar wind particles reach Earth, our planet's magnetic field catches most of them and funnels them down toward the poles. There they crash into the upper atmosphere and light it up, the northern and southern lights. A strong burst of solar wind can also disturb satellites and power grids on the ground.
So the honest answer is not "there is no wind in space." It is that space has no ordinary wind, and one very extraordinary kind instead.
Common questions
Is there wind in space?
Not the ordinary kind. Space has almost no air, and wind needs air to exist. There is something called solar wind, but it is a stream of charged particles rather than moving air.
What is solar wind made of?
Charged particles, mostly protons and electrons, thrown off the Sun's outer atmosphere. It is a stream of plasma, not gas, so it behaves very differently from wind on Earth.
How fast does solar wind travel?
Between about 250 and 750 km/s, hundreds of times faster than the fastest hurricane on Earth, though it is far too thin to push on anything the way Earth wind does.
Does solar wind cause the aurora?
Yes. Earth's magnetic field channels solar wind particles toward the poles, where they light up the upper atmosphere as the northern and southern lights.