The sun warms the Earth, making it habitable for people and animals. But that’s not all it does, and it affects a much larger area of space. The heliosphere, the area of space influenced by the sun, is over a hundred times larger than the distance from the sun to the Earth.
The sun is a star that constantly emits a steady stream of plasma – highly energized ionized gas – called the solar wind. In addition to the constant solar wind, the sun also occasionally releases eruptions of plasma called coronal mass ejections, or CMEs.