Next: Introduction
Abstract:
Recent observations with the LASCO coronagraph on board of SOHO
have shown that helmet streamers may have a triple structure
even during the solar activity minimum. The streamer regions have been
identified as the source regions for the slow solar wind and new
observations provide evidence that a stationary slow solar wind
may not exist, but that the slow solar wind
is produced by many little eruptions
leading to an approximately stationary plasma flow on
large scales. The observations further show,
that the streamer structures occasionally go unstable, leading to huge coronal mass ejections.
We want to undertake a first step towards a better theoretical understanding of
these phenomena and present a method to calculate analytically
self-consistent stationary helmet streamer configurations with triple structures. We then use these stationary configurations
as input for time-dependent MHD simulations to
model the generation of the slow solar wind and
the occurrence of coronal mass ejections within triple streamers.
Helmet streamers, MHD equilibria, Coronal Mass Ejections,
Solar Wind
Thomas Wiegelmann
Fri Jul 3 12:30:46 MET DST 1998