Core to solar wind: a stepwise model for heating the solar corona

TL;DR

This paper proposes a stepwise model linking solar interior processes to solar wind acceleration, highlighting the role of resistivity, radiative cooling, and plasma expansion in coronal heating and space weather phenomena.

Contribution

It introduces a novel integrated model connecting the solar interior, transition region, and solar wind acceleration, emphasizing the continuity of energy transfer.

Findings

Resistivity limits ohmic heating in the chromosphere.

Radiative cooling decelerates plasma at about 6000 K.

Expansion into space accelerates ions, contributing to the solar wind.

Abstract

Operating experience from fusion research shows how Spitzer resistivity may render ohmic heating in the chromosphere self limiting and thus serve to define the lower margin of the transition region. Its upper margin is at about 6000 K, where radiative cooling of He:H plasma decelerates sharply. The third and last stage in the proposed scheme is expansion into the tenuous plasma of space, which leads to the acceleration of ions to high energies, long recorded by spacecraft instruments. There is thus dynamic continuity all the way from the solar interior, the energy source for spinning columns in the Rayleigh Benard setting of the convection zone, to the coronal exhalation of the solar wind, a finding which should benefit the analysis of space weather, witness the association between helium in the solar wind and the incidence of coronal mass ejections.