Our goals

An example of magnetic field modelling, which highlights sources of slow and fast solar wind as viewed from PSP and other missions. These model predictions were made available to the facilities observing at these key times during Parker Solar Probe’s first perihelion.

This ISSI team will address the overarching science question:

What are the sources of the solar wind and what processes lead to its generation and acceleration?

This ISSI team ran from January 2020 to April 2023. The launch of Parker Solar Probe has initiated a new era of observing the heliosphere very close to the Sun. During PSP’s perihelia, the solar disk was observed extensively by space-based missions such as Hinode as well as by ground-based telescopes, such as those operated by the NSO. Similar observations are also being carried out during Solar Orbiter’s science perihelia. Weaving remote sensing observations of source regions and in situ plasma measurements together into a coherent picture of the solar wind requires intensive collaboration between the fields of space plasma physics, solar physics, and the various modelling communities. This ISSI team brought experts in these areas together for the collaboration needed to make progress on exploiting this collaboration to tackle the overarching science question of this project. We have produced a number of publications based around linkage science – what are the sources of the solar wind plasma measured at close proximity to the Sun? This has involved papers studying very weak type III bursts and their linkage to a small emerging active region. Another paper looks at all characteristics in a coronal hole and correlated them to the solar wind parameters and other work has correlated the solar wind activity to network scale behaviour on the Sun.