Conductive Heating of the Solar Wind. I.

Abstract

The hydrodynamic equations for the solar corona with no external heat source beyond a thin shell are solved for the case of fast expansion. We assume that the corona is approximately tO per cent ionized helium, and that the Chapman value for the unihibited thermal conductivity can be used everywhere. The equations are integrated from the earth to the sun on an IBM 7090 computer, and a power series expansion is used in the neighborhood of the singularity at r , where kT(r ) = mu2(r . We find that thermal conduction naturally supplies sufficient heating to accelerate particles to the observed solar wind flux near the earth, if the inner coronal densities are near the accepted values, with a base temperature near 2 X 1O K. The stabilization effects associated with viscosity and the solar magnetic field are examined