EGU23-17376, updated on 26 Feb 2023
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu23-17376
EGU General Assembly 2023
© Author(s) 2023. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Magnetic Reconnection as the Driver of the Solar Wind

Nour E. Raouafi1, Guillermo Stenborg1, Dan B. Seaton2, Haimin Wang3,4,5, Jason Wang3,4,5, Craig E. DeForest2, Stuart D. Bale6,7, James F. Drake8, Vadim M. Uritsky9,10, Judith T. Karpen10, Carl R. DeVore10, Alphonse C. Sterling11, Timothy S. Horbury12, Louise K. Harra13,14, Sofiane Bourouaine1, Justin C. Kasper15, Pankaj Kumar10,16, Tai D. Phan7, and Marco Velli17
Nour E. Raouafi et al.
  • 1The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, MD 20723, USA
  • 2Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, CO 80302, USA
  • 3Institute for Space Weather Sciences, New Jersey Institute of Technology, University Heights, Newark, NJ 07102, USA
  • 4Big Bear Solar Observatory, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Big Bear City, CA 92314, USA
  • 5Center for Solar-Terrestrial Research, New Jersey Institute of Technology, University Heights, Newark, NJ 07102-1982, USA
  • 6Physics Department, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA
  • 7Space Sciences Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA
  • 8Department of Physics, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA
  • 9Catholic University of America, 620 Michigan Avenue NE, Washington, DC 20061, USA
  • 10Heliophysics Science Division, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD 20771, USA
  • 11NASA/Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, AL 35812, USA
  • 12The Blackett Laboratory, Imperial College London, London, SW7 2AZ, UK
  • 13PMOD/WRC, Dorfstrasse33 7260 Davos Dorf, Switzerland
  • 14ETH-Zurich, Ho ̈nggerberg campus, HIT building, Zu ̈rich, Switzerland
  • 15BWX Technologies, Inc., Washington DC 20002, USA
  • 16Department of Physics, American University, Washington, DC 20016, USA
  • 17Earth Planetary and Space Sciences, UCLA, CA 90095, USA

We present an overview of EUV solar observations showing evidence for ubiquitous small-scale jetting activity (i.e., a.k.a. jetlets) driven by magnetic reconnection that might be the primary driver of the solar wind at its source. The jetlets, like the solar wind and the heating of the coronal plasma, are omnipresent throughout the solar cycle. Each event arises from small-scale reconnection of opposite polarity magnetic fields producing a short-lived jet of hot plasma and Alfvén waves into the corona. The discrete nature of the jetlets leads to intermittent outflows from the corona, which homogenize as they propagate away from the Sun and form the solar wind. This discovery establishes the importance of small-scale magnetic reconnection in solar and stellar atmospheres in understanding ubiquitous phenomena such as coronal heating and solar wind acceleration. Based on previous analyses linking the switchbacks to the magnetic network, we also argue that these new observations might provide the link between the magnetic activity at the base of the corona and the switchback solar wind phenomenon. These new observations need to be put in the bigger picture of the role of magnetic reconnection and the diverse form of jetting in the solar atmosphere.

How to cite: Raouafi, N. E., Stenborg, G., Seaton, D. B., Wang, H., Wang, J., DeForest, C. E., Bale, S. D., Drake, J. F., Uritsky, V. M., Karpen, J. T., DeVore, C. R., Sterling, A. C., Horbury, T. S., Harra, L. K., Bourouaine, S., Kasper, J. C., Kumar, P., Phan, T. D., and Velli, M.: Magnetic Reconnection as the Driver of the Solar Wind, EGU General Assembly 2023, Vienna, Austria, 24–28 Apr 2023, EGU23-17376, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu23-17376, 2023.