We discuss the existence and asymptotic behavior of plasma solitary waves of the Euler-Poisson system which arises in the dynamics of plasmas. We first show the Euler-Poisson system admits a two-parameter family of the traveling solitary wave solutions, under the super-ion-acoustic condition, and show that the solitary wave converges to that of the associated KdV equation as the traveling speed tends to the ion-acoustic speed. As solutions of the KdV equation are dominated by their solitary waves, one may expect a similar result for the Euler-Poisson system with more general data. As a first step, we investigate the linear convective stability of the solitary waves of the Euler-Poisson system. If time permits, we shall discuss some key features of the proof of the linear stability. This is joint work with J. Bae (NCTS at National Taiwan University).