No Arabic abstract
Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) contributes to the perturbation of solar wind in the heliosphere. Thus, depending on the different phases of the solar cycle and the rate of CME occurrence, contribution of CMEs to solar wind parameters near the Earth changes. In the present study, we examine the long term occurrence rate of CMEs, their speeds, angular widths and masses. We attempt to find correlation between near sun parameters, determined using white light images from coronagraphs, with solar wind measurements near the Earth from in-situ instruments. Importantly, we attempt to find what fraction of the averaged solar wind mass near the Earth is provided by the CMEs during different phases of the solar cycles.
The strength of the radial component of the interplanetary magnetic field (IMF), which is a measure of the Suns total open flux, is observed to vary by roughly a factor of two over the 11 yr solar cycle. Several recent studies have proposed that the Suns open flux consists of a constant or floor component that dominates at sunspot minimum, and a time-varying component due to coronal mass ejections (CMEs). Here, we point out that CMEs cannot account for the large peaks in the IMF strength which occurred in 2003 and late 2014, and which coincided with peaks in the Suns equatorial dipole moment. We also show that near-Earth interplanetary CMEs, as identified in the catalog of Richardson and Cane, contribute at most $sim$30% of the average radial IMF strength even during sunspot maximum. We conclude that the long-term variation of the radial IMF strength is determined mainly by the Suns total dipole moment, with the quadrupole moment and CMEs providing an additional boost near sunspot maximum. Most of the open flux is rooted in coronal holes, whose solar cycle evolution in turn reflects that of the Suns lowest-order multipoles.
Similar to the Sun, other stars shed mass and magnetic flux via ubiquitous quasi-steady wind and episodic stellar coronal mass ejections (CMEs). We investigate the mass loss rate via solar wind and CMEs as a function of solar magnetic variability represented in terms of sunspot number and solar X-ray background luminosity. We estimate the contribution of CMEs to the total solar wind mass flux in the ecliptic and beyond, and its variation over different phases of the solar activity cycles. The study exploits the number of sunspots observed, coronagraphic observations of CMEs near the Sun by SOHO/LASCO, in situ observations of the solar wind at 1 AU by WIND, and GOES X-ray flux during solar cycle 23 and 24. We note that the X-ray background luminosity, occurrence rate of CMEs and ICMEs, solar wind mass flux, and associated mass loss rates from the Sun do not decrease as strongly as the sunspot number from the maximum of solar cycle 23 to the next maximum. Our study confirms a true physical increase in CME activity relative to the sunspot number in cycle 24. We show that the CME occurrence rate and associated mass loss rate can be better predicted by X-ray background luminosity than the sunspot number. The solar wind mass loss rate which is an order of magnitude more than the CME mass loss rate shows no obvious dependency on cyclic variation in sunspot number and solar X-ray background luminosity. These results have implications to the study of solar-type stars.
This Topical Issue of Solar Physics, devoted to the study of flux-rope structure in coronal mass ejections (CMEs), is based on two Coordinated Data Analysis Workshops (CDAWs) held in 2010 (20 - 23 September in Dan Diego, California, USA) and 2011 (September 5-9 in Alcala, Spain). The primary purpose of the CDAWs was to address the question: Do all CMEs have flux rope structure? There are 18 papers om this topical issue, including this preface.
Aims: We investigate whether solar coronal mass ejections are driven mainly by coupling to the ambient solar wind or through the release of internal magnetic energy. Methods: We examine the energetics of 39 flux-rope like coronal mass ejections (CMEs) from the Sun using data in the distance range $sim$ 2--20 $R_{odot}$ from the Large Angle Spectroscopic Coronograph (LASCO) aboard the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO). This comprises a complete sample of the best examples of flux-rope CMEs observed by LASCO in 1996-2001. Results: We find that 69% of the CMEs in our sample experience a clearly identifiable driving power in the LASCO field of view. For the CMEs that are driven, we examine if they might be deriving most of their driving power by coupling to the solar wind. We do not find conclusive evidence in favor of this hypothesis. On the other hand, we find that their internal magnetic energy is a viable source of the required driving power. We have estimated upper and lower limits on the power that can possibly be provided by the internal magnetic field of a CME. We find that, on average, the lower limit to the available magnetic power is around 74% of what is required to drive the CMEs, while the upper limit can be as much as an order of magnitude larger.
We demonstrate how the parameters of a Gibson-Low flux-rope-based coronal mass ejection (CME) can be constrained using remote observations. Our Multi Scale Fluid-Kinetic Simulation Suite (MS-FLUKSS) has been used to simulate the propagation of a CME in a data driven solar corona background computed using the photospheric magnetogram data. We constrain the CME model parameters using the observations of such key CME properties as its speed, orientation, and poloidal flux. The speed and orientation are estimated using multi-viewpoint white-light coronagraph images. The reconnected magnetic flux in the area covered by the post eruption arcade is used to estimate the poloidal flux in the CME flux rope. We simulate the partial halo CME on 7 March 2011 to demonstrate the efficiency of our approach. This CME erupted with the speed of 812 km/s and its poloidal flux, as estimated from source active region data, was 4.9e21 Mx. Using our approach, we were able to simulate this CME with the speed 840 km/s and the poloidal flux of 5.1e21 Mx, in remarkable agreement with the observations.