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A.I. Poland (NASA/GSFC), J. Chae (Big Bear Solar Obs. New Jersey Inst. of Tech.)
The problem of observing outflow of material from the Sun has been an interesting issue in solar physics for several decades. The problem is that we know material flows from the Sun since there is a solar wind measured at Earth and in interplanetary space. However, observations in the chromosphere, transition region, and lower corona show mostly inflow with almost no outflow. In a recent paper by Hassler and coworkers it was shown that there is a significant outflow at network boundaries as seen in NeVIII (Te~800,000K), but no significant outflows have been observed at other temperatures.
In our earlier work we demonstrated why one would expect to see only inflows below 100,000K. The energy balance between conduction, radiation, and enthalpy resulted in gradients being too steep to observe outflowing material. We have extended that work to 1,000,000K and included the observed effects of the spreading magnetic field with temperature. These new calculation results seem to be in agreement with the observations and indicate that outflows should only be observable in the 800,000K range.
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