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Middle corona

Magnetic imprints in the solar wind

Nature Astronomy volume 7, pages 128–129 (2023)Cite this article

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The transformations of energy that accompany solar magnetic activity have far-reaching ramifications beyond heliophysics. Understanding the dynamical chain is fundamental to assess habitability and the capacity for life elsewhere.

The Sun and most solar-like stars are surrounded by an envelope of hot gas, the corona, that expands outwards into space in the form of a supersonic plasma wind. Spacecraft observations up until and throughout the 1990s, specifically from the Helios and Ulysses spacecraft (the only mission to fly over the solar poles), demonstrated that the solar wind emerging from the polar open regions of the corona was typically fast, with speeds ranging between 700 and 800 km s–1 at Earth’s orbit, while in the ecliptic plane the wind was much slower, sometimes as low as 200–300 km s–1. Observations also showed that the slow wind seems to occupy a region of space too extended to be made up only of the ‘edges of coronal holes’, or the boundaries between open and closed coronal magnetic field lines: something was clearly missing in our understanding of how the solar magnetic field connects into the heliosphere.

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Fig. 1: The coronal web.

References

  1. Chitta, L. P., Seaton, D. B., Downs, C., DeForest, C. E. & Higginson, A. K. Nat. Astron. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-022-01834-5 (2022).

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  1. Institute of Geophysics & Planetary Physics, Department of Earth, Planetary & Space Sciences, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Marco Velli

  2. J. Geiss Fellow, International Space Science Institute, Bern, Switzerland

    Marco Velli

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  1. Marco Velli
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Correspondence to Marco Velli.

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Velli, M. Magnetic imprints in the solar wind. Nat Astron 7, 128–129 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-022-01883-w

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-022-01883-w

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