Speaker
Description
Interchange reconnection has been proposed as a mechanism for the generation of the slow solar wind, and a key contributor to determining its characteristic qualities. We study the implications of interchange reconnection for the structure of the plasma and field in the heliosphere in the context of the "S-Web" model. We show that photospheric driving at supergranular scales leads to a corrugation (at low altitudes) of the separatrix surfaces that define the streamer and (to a lesser extent) the pseudostreamer. We demonstrate that newly-opened magnetic flux is distributed in a filamentary pattern in the heliosphere, suggesting that the pattern of granular and supergranular flows on the photosphere should leave an observable imprint in the heliosphere. As a result the connectivity of a heliospheric spacecraft trajectory to the photosphere exhibits high complexity.
