Yardley, Stephanie L;
Brooks, David H;
D'Amicis, Raffaella;
Owen, Christopher J;
Long, David M;
Baker, Deb;
Demoulin, Pascal;
... Schuhle, Udo; + view all
(2024)
Multi-source connectivity as the driver of solar wind variability in the heliosphere.
Nature Astronomy
, 8
(8)
pp. 953-963.
10.1038/s41550-024-02278-9.
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Abstract
The ambient solar wind that fills the heliosphere originates from multiple sources in the solar corona and is highly structured. It is often described as high-speed, relatively homogeneous, plasma streams from coronal holes and slow-speed, highly variable, streams whose source regions are under debate. A key goal of ESA/NASA’s Solar Orbiter mission is to identify solar wind sources and understand what drives the complexity seen in the heliosphere. By combining magnetic field modelling and spectroscopic techniques with high-resolution observations and measurements, we show that the solar wind variability detected in situ by Solar Orbiter in March 2022 is driven by spatio-temporal changes in the magnetic connectivity to multiple sources in the solar atmosphere. The magnetic field footpoints connected to the spacecraft moved from the boundaries of a coronal hole to one active region (12961) and then across to another region (12957). This is reflected in the in situ measurements, which show the transition from fast to highly Alfvénic then to slow solar wind that is disrupted by the arrival of a coronal mass ejection. Our results describe solar wind variability at 0.5 au but are applicable to near-Earth observatories.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Multi-source connectivity as the driver of solar wind variability in the heliosphere |
| Location: | England |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1038/s41550-024-02278-9 |
| Publisher version: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41550-024-02278-9 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences > Dept of Space and Climate Physics |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10196982 |
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