When: Friday, October 28, 2022, 2:30 PM - 3:30 PMWhere: Physics (G. O. Jones building) room 610 & online
Speaker: Time Horbury (Imperial)
Fine scale structure of the solar wind – transients and turbulence
The Sun creates and controls the solar wind, which is both a prototype stellar wind and also affects our lives on Earth, via space weather effects. Despite over six decades of direct observations of the solar wind, many questions remain, including how the wind is heated and accelerated, and how structures on the Sun affect the properties of the wind itself. With the launches of Parker Solar Probe and Solar Orbiter, we have entered a new era of exploration of the inner heliosphere. With both missions operating simultaneously, we have the capability, during fortuitous alignments, of measuring the properties of the same solar wind stream at different distances, and hence being able to quantify how the near-Sun wind evolves into that with which we are familiar near the Earth. We also now have high quality remote observations of the Sun to provide context of its source regions. I will show examples of such an alignment and discuss how fine scale structure evolves into the broadband fluctuations that are present farther from the Sun.