How does the solar wind blow? Some basic aspects

Abstract

Major properties of the solar atmosphere and wind are not understood. The energy distribution of the solar atmosphere perturbations, over nearly ten orders of magnitude in energy, is close (within one order of magnitude) to a power-law of index -2, even though there is no agreement on the detailed shape. There is no agreed explanation of the origin of the solar wind, either, nor of the fact that the total wind energy flux is independent of speed, latitude, and phase of solar cycle, with an average base flux of 70 W/m – a figure that is similar for a number of other cool stellar winds, and is close to the total observed energy flux of solar atmosphere perturbations. A major theoretical difficulty is that both coronal heating and wind production depend fundamentally on the heat flux, and the solar atmosphere is not collisional enough for classical transport theory to hold. Heat transport thus behaves non classically and the particle velocity distributions may have significant high energy tails, which should dramatically affect coronal heating and solar wind acceleration, in a way that is outside the scope of standard MHD.