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arXiv · 2608.28873

Statistical Energy Budget of the Solar Wind with Parker Solar Probe and Solar Orbiter : 1 - Unbalanced Total Energy Radial Evolution

Jean-Baptiste Dakeyo·Pascal Démoulin·Victor Réville·Stuart Bale·Tamar Ervin·Milan Maksimovic·Olga Alexandrova·Mingzhe Liu·Roberto Livi·Nikos Sioulas·Orlando Romeo·Alexis Rouillard
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Abstract

The magneto-hydrodynamic (MHD) description of the solar wind has long been regarded as one of the most successful frameworks for investigating solar wind heating and acceleration. Under a set of simplifying assumptions, it provides a reduced large-scale description that is widely used to study the energetic role of electromagnetic fluctuations in the solar wind energy budget. In practice, applying simplification to MHD can result in the loss of some physics compared to an exact set of equations. However, an observational energy budget can help us to verify whether any energetic information has been lost in the process of simplification. To do so, we directly test the validity of the large-scale non-linear ideal MHD energy budget with solar wind observations from Parker Solar Probe (PSP) and Solar Orbiter (SO). After verifying the reliability of the measurements through comparison with previous studies of similar solar wind properties, we test the conservation of the total energy predicted by the MHD theory. We find that the average total energy increases with radial distance by $56\%$ ($\pm9\%$) between 14 and 203 solar radii. The increase in kinetic energy is not sufficiently compensated by the decrease of the thermal and electromagnetic contributions. We investigate the major sources of observational uncertainty and find that they cannot account for the observed energy increase. These results suggest that the large-scale theoretical description may neglect an energetically significant contribution to solar wind acceleration. Assuming that such a contribution exists, we predict that this extra energy would scale with radial distance as $r^{-0.54\pm0.38}$.

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Jean-Baptiste Dakeyo, Pascal Démoulin, Victor Réville, Stuart Bale, Tamar Ervin, Milan Maksimovic, Olga Alexandrova, Mingzhe Liu, Roberto Livi, Nikos Sioulas, Orlando Romeo, Alexis Rouillard. 2026-08-28. Statistical Energy Budget of the Solar Wind with Parker Solar Probe and Solar Orbiter : 1 - Unbalanced Total Energy Radial Evolution. https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.28873

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