The dynamical heliosphere

The Heliosphere in Time

Because of the dynamic nature of the interstellar medium, the Sun should have encountered a variety of different interstellar environments in its lifetime. As the solar wind interacts with the surrounding interstellar medium to form a heliosphere, different helio-sphere shapes, sizes, and particle contents result from the different environments. Some of the large possible interstellar parameter...

Multifractal Turbulence in the Heliosphere

Boundary Conditions of the Heliosphere

Radiative transfer equilibrium models of nearby interstellar matter (ISM) are required to determine the boundary conditions of the heliosphere from astronomical observations of nearby stars. These models are also constrained by data on the ISM inside of the solar system, including pickup ion, anomalous cosmic rays, and in situ He data. The two best ISM models give semi-empirical filtration fact...

The Solar Wind in the Outer Heliosphere

This paper reviews solar wind observations in the outer heliosphere, concentrating on new developments in the past 3 years. Voyager 2 has detected an increase in speed and decrease in normalized density, consistent with spending more time in the fast polar ow as it moves to higher heliolatitudes. The proton temperatures continue the increase which began at about 35 AU. We describe a new feature...

Tracking Streamer Blobs into the Heliosphere

In this paper, we use coronal and heliospheric images from the Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) spacecraft to track streamer blobs into the heliosphere and to observe them being swept up and compressed by the fast wind from low-latitude coronal holes. From an analysis of their elongation/time tracks, we discover a “locus of enhanced visibility” where neighboring blobs pass each ...