Related papers: Origins of the Ambient Solar Wind: Implications fo…
The solar atmosphere shows anomalous variation in temperature, starting from the 5500 K photosphere to the million-degree Kelvin corona. The corona itself expands into the interstellar medium as the free streaming solar wind, which…
This paper reviews our growing understanding of the physics behind coronal heating (in open-field regions) and the acceleration of the solar wind. Many new insights have come from the last solar cycle's worth of observations and theoretical…
The corona is a layer of hot plasma that surrounds the Sun, traces out its complex magnetic field, and ultimately expands into interplanetary space as the supersonic solar wind. Although much has been learned in recent decades from advances…
The origins of the hot solar corona and the supersonically expanding solar wind are still the subject of much debate. This paper summarizes some of the essential ingredients of realistic and self-consistent models of solar wind…
This paper reviews the current state of our understanding of high-speed solar wind acceleration in coronal holes. Observations by SOHO, coupled with interplanetary particle measurements going back several decades, have put strong…
Studying the ambient solar wind, a continuous pressure-driven plasma flow emanating from our Sun, is an important component of space weather research. The ambient solar wind flows in interplanetary space determine how solar storms evolve…
Plasma in the Sun's hot corona expands into the heliosphere as a supersonic and highly magnetized solar wind. This paper provides an overview of our current understanding of how the corona is heated and how the solar wind is accelerated.…
Parker's initial insights from 1958 provided a key causal link between the heating of the solar corona and the acceleration of the solar wind. However, we still do not know what fraction of the solar wind's mass, momentum, and energy flux…
This Letter reports the first observational estimate of the heating rate in the slowly expanding solar corona. The analysis exploits the simultaneous remote and local observations of the same coronal plasma volume with the Solar…
Determining the mechanisms responsible for the heating of the coronal plasma and maintaining and accelerating the solar wind are long standing goals in solar physics. There is a clear need to constrain the energy, mass and momentum flux…
We show that the coronal heating and the acceleration of the fast solar wind in the coronal holes are natural consequence of the footpoint fluctuations of the magnetic fields at the photosphere by one-dimensional, time-dependent, and…
The solar corona has been revealed in the past decade to be a highly dynamic nonequilibrium plasma environment. Both the loop-filled coronal base and the extended acceleration region of the solar wind appear to be strongly turbulent, but…
The Sun continuously expels a fraction of its own mass in the form of a steadily accelerating outflow of ionized gas called the "solar wind." The solar wind is the extension of the Sun's hot (million-degree Kelvin) outer atmosphere that is…
We derive a simple analytical model for the propagation of HSSs from the Sun to Earth and thereby show how the area of coronal holes and the size of their boundary regions affect the HSS velocity, temperature, and density near Earth. We…
Coronal holes are the darkest and least active regions of the Sun, as observed both on the solar disk and above the solar limb. Coronal holes are associated with rapidly expanding open magnetic fields and the acceleration of the high-speed…
Solar wind models predict that the mass flux carried away from the Sun in the solar wind should be extremely sensitive to the temperature in the corona, where the solar wind is accelerated. We perform a direct test of this prediction in…
We show that the coronal heating and the fast solar wind acceleration in the coronal holes are natural consequence of the footpoint fluctuations of the magnetic fields at the photosphere, by performing one-dimensional magnetohydrodynamical…
Magnetic waves are a relevant component in the dynamics of the solar atmosphere. Their significance has increased because of their potential as a remote diagnostic tool and their presumed contribution to plasma heating processes. We discuss…
The high-speed solar wind is typically the simplest and least stochastic type of large-scale plasma flow in the heliosphere. For much of the solar cycle, it is connected magnetically to large polar coronal holes on the Sun's surface.…
Determining the heating mechanism (or mechanisms) that causes the outer atmosphere of the Sun, and many other stars, to reach temperatures orders of magnitude higher than their surface temperatures has long been a key problem. For decades…