New Insights into Solar Wind Physics from SOHO

Abstract

The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) was launched in December 1995 with a suite of instruments designed to answer long-standing questions about the Sun's internal structure, its extensive outer atmosphere, and the solar wind. This paper reviews the new understanding of the physical processes responsible for the solar wind that have come from the past 8 years of SOHO observations, analysis, and theoretical work. For example, the UVCS instrument on SOHO has revealed the acceleration region of the fast solar wind to be far from simple thermal equilibrium. Evidence for preferential acceleration of ions, 100 million K ion temperatures, and marked departures from Maxwellian velocity distributions all point to specific types of collisionless heating processes. The slow solar wind, typically associated with bright helmet streamers, has been found to share some of the nonthermal characteristics of the fast wind. Abundance measurements from spectroscopy and visible-light coronagraphic movies from LASCO have led to a better census of the plasma components making up the slow wind. The origins of the solar wind in the photosphere and chromosphere have been better elucidated with disk spectroscopy from the SUMER and CDS instruments. Finally, the impact of the solar wind on spacecraft systems, ground-based technology, and astronauts has been greatly aided by having continuous solar observations at the Earth-Sun L1 point, and SOHO has set a strong precedent for future studies of space weather.