Connecting the Dots - Magnetic Field in the Inner Heliosphere
Abstract
At any given time the Earth is connected by a cluster of magnetic field lines to the solar photosphere. The same holds true for any location in the heliosphere - be it a solar orbiting spacecraft, region of particle acceleration, source of southward IMF, flare site, ICME, co-rotating interaction region, comet, planet, etc. That cluster of field lines may have a common origin that is relatively easy to identify, e.g. in the center of a high speed stream originating in an equatorial coronal hole. More often the geometry is complex - adjacent field lines may come from widely separated places, the coronal topology may be convoluted, and the field will have been distorted during its transit. Furthermore, conditions change and history is important - foot points move or reconnect, the corona is dynamic - sometimes dramatically so, and the prior state of the heliosphere matters. Conversely, a region of interest, e.g. an active region, coronal hole, reconnection site, or shock, may be linked simply or in a more complex way to one or many other locations in the heliosphere. We bring together a variety of coronal and heliospheric modeling tools and new sources of comprehensive solar data to improve the knowledge of how points in the heliosphere are connected to each other and to the photosphere and how those connections evolve in time. Our goal is to determine not only the useful magnetic connections in the corona and inner heliosphere, but the implications of the corona's fundamental skeletal structure for understanding sources of in situ observations.
- Publication:
-
American Astronomical Society Meeting Abstracts #224
- Pub Date:
- June 2014
- Bibcode:
- 2014AAS...22432364H