Abstract
The history and present state of large-scale magnetohydrodynamic modeling of the solar corona and the solar wind with steady or quasi-steady coronal physics is reviewed. We put the evolution of ideas leading to the recognition of the existence of an expanding solar atmosphere into historical context. The development and main features of the first generation of global corona and solar wind models are described in detail. This historical perspective is also applied to the present suite of global corona and solar wind models. We discuss the evolution of new ideas and their implementation into numerical simulation codes. We point out the scientific and computational challenges facing these models and discuss the ways various groups tried to overcome these challenges. Next, we discuss the latest, state-of-the art models and point to the expected next steps in modeling the corona and the interplanetary medium.
Highlights
It was realized thousands of years ago that the space between heavenly objects must be filled by something that is much lighter than the materials found on Earth
We find that the source of the slow solar wind is plasma originating from the coronal hole boundaries that overexpands and fails to accelerate to high speed as it fills the volume of space radially above the streamer belt
This pioneering study culminated in a paper by Coleman (1968), a work that concluded that Alfvén wave turbulence has the potential to drive solar wind in a way that is consistent with observations at 1 AU
Summary
Thirty-three years after the so-called “Carrington event”, Lord Kelvin (William Thomson), in a Presidential Address to the Royal Society, argued that the Sun was incapable of powering even a moderate-sized magnetic storm: His argument was based on his unwillingness to think outside the box and his not accepting the possibility that the Sun might be powered by a process that was not understandable in terms of “classical” physics. He was trying to explain the Sun’s energy production within the framework of coal burning. The electron was discovered at the very end of the nineteenth century (Thomson 1897) and the concept of an electrically neutral solar radiation composed of oppositely charged particles was not introduced until the middle of the 1910s (Birkeland 1916)
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