SHINE: Accelerating the Turbulent Solar Wind: One Flux Tube at a Time

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This three-year SHINE project aims to improve physical understanding of the origin of the turbulent solar wind. The hot, ionized outer atmosphere of the Sun is a unique laboratory for the study of magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) and plasma physics, with ranges of parameters that are inaccessible on the Earth. However, even after many years of investigation, the basic processes responsible for heating the million-degree solar corona and accelerating the solar wind are still not known. One primary reason for this lack of understanding is that the Sun's magnetic field is so topologically complex, with spatial and temporal scales that vary over many orders of magnitude. New observations are revealing heretofore unavailable details, so the related theoretical models must similarly improve in order to have any hope of providing deeper understanding of the physics. This project will use novel combinations of observations and theoretical models to put firm constraints on the connectivity between the rapidly evolving magnetic flux tubes in the solar corona and various types of MHD fluctuations that propagate through them into the heliosphere and dissipate to heat the plasma. The results of this research project will be published in widely available journals and presented at scientific conferences. In addition, the PI will continue developing software tools and databases to encourage and enable others in the solar-heliospheric community to make practical use of these research results. The research agenda of this project supports the Strategic Goals of the AGS Division in discovery, learning, diversity, and interdisciplinary research.