| Issue |
A&A
Volume 702, October 2025
|
|
|---|---|---|
| Article Number | L4 | |
| Number of page(s) | 9 | |
| Section | Letters to the Editor | |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202556696 | |
| Published online | 30 September 2025 | |
Letter to the Editor
Magnetic reconnection sustains the mass budget of the solar wind
1
Max-Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS), 37077 Göttingen, Germany
2
Institute for Solar Physics (KIS), Georges-Köhler-Allee 401A, 79110 Freiburg, Germany
3
Institute for Space-Earth Environmental Research, Nagoya University, Furocho, Chikusa-ku, Nagoya, 464-8601 Aichi, Japan
⋆ Corresponding author: cheny@mps.mpg.de
Received:
1
August
2025
Accepted:
15
September
2025
The solar wind originates from open magnetic field regions on the Sun, but the processes relevant to its origin remain unsolved. We present a self-consistent numerical model of the source region of the wind, in which jets similar to those observed on the Sun naturally emerge due to magnetic reconnection between closed and open magnetic fields. In this process, material is transferred from closed to open field lines and fed into the solar wind. We quantified the mass flux through the magnetic field connected to the heliosphere and found that it greatly exceeds the amount required to sustain the wind. This supports a decades-old suspicion based on spectroscopic observations, indicating that magnetic reconnection in the low solar atmosphere could sustain the solar wind.
Key words: magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) / Sun: corona / Sun: magnetic fields / solar wind
© The Authors 2025
Open Access article, published by EDP Sciences, under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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Open access funding provided by Max Planck Society.
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