Reconstructing solar wind inhomogeneous structures from stereoscopic observations in white-light: Small transients along the Sun-Earth line

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new correlation-based method to automatically identify and analyze small-scale transients in the solar wind using stereoscopic white-light observations, revealing their periodicity and relation to solar structures.

Contribution

A novel automated correlation analysis technique for reconstructing inhomogeneous solar wind structures from stereoscopic images.

Findings

Small-scale transients are more frequent than large-scale ones by at least a factor of 2.

A 27-day periodic pattern of transients aligns with solar rotation and magnetic structures.

Small transients diffuse into the background solar wind within about 40 Rs.

Abstract

The Heliospheric Imagers (HI) on board the two spacecraft of the Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) provided white-light images of transients in the solar wind from dual perspectives from 2007 to 2014. In this paper, we develop a new method to identify and locate the transients automatically from simultaneous images from the two inner telescopes, known as HI-1, based on a correlation analysis. Correlation coefficient (cc) maps along the Sun-Earth line are constructed for the period from 1 Jan 2010 to 28 Feb 2011. From the maps, transients propagating along the Sun-Earth line are identified, and a 27-day periodic pattern is revealed, especially for small-scale transients. Such a periodicity in the transient pattern is consistent with the rotation of the Sun's global magnetic structure and the periodic crossing of the streamer structures and slow solar wind across the Sun-Earth line, and this substantiates the reliability of our method and the high degree of association between the small-scale transients of the slow solar wind and the coronal streamers. Besides, it is suggested by the cc map that small-scale transients along the Sun-Earth line are more frequent than large-scale transients by a factor of at least 2, and that they quickly diffused into background solar wind within about 40 Rs in terms of the signal-to-noise ratio of white-light emissions. The method provides a new tool to reconstruct inhomogeneous structures in the heliosphere from multiple perspectives.