3D Location of Small Solar Wind Tracers

Abstract:

The so-called "blobs" as defined in Sheeley et al., 1997, are small-scale structures embedded in the continuously expanding white-light solar corona and are considered to be tracers of the slow solar wind. As blobs are very faint structures, we considered long periods (around 2 to 5 days) where there were no coronal mass ejections (CME). The scarce presence of CMEs during the extended past solar minimum has permitted the identification of continuous blobs detachments, allowing us to estimate their un-projected trajectories between 2 and 15 solar radii (Mierla et al., 2008). In agreement with the idea that blobs are liberated from the cusps of helmet steamers (Wang et al., 1998), we constrained the observing region of interest in the coronagraphs field of view to ±30° from the Sun's equator. We studied cases where blobs were detected by the coronagraphs C2/LASCO and COR2/SECCHI, and inferred their source locations using two packages that implement the 3D potential field source surface (PFSS) model: (1) PFSS developed by De Rosa (2010) and (2) PFSS (De Rosa) in FORWARD (people.hao.ucar.edu/sgibson/FORWARD/). The locations of the origin of blobs that we find, support previous results that track down the origin of the slow solar wind to regions near the helmet streamers and pseudostreamers (Wang et al., 2012, Riley&Luhmann, 2012). Additionally, we found that in some cases blobs are coming from the boundaries of growing or decaying equatorial coronal holes, where the interchange reconnection is
supposed to be faster.