A note on the origin of the Sun's polar field

Hoyle, F. and N. C. Wickramasinghe, A note on the origin of the Sun's polar field, MNRAS, 123, 51 (1961) (ADS)

The cartoon

(click on the image for a larger version)

The paper presenting this cartoon, which described the origin of the global solar polar field, attests to Fred Hoyle's [1] continued interest in solar magnetism (see also the iconic Gold-Hoyle flare cartoon). They were concerned with the time scales and thanked Peter Sweet [2] for help with this issue. Though the shorthand idea of magnetic reconnection was already available, the presentation here is in terms of Ohmic dissipation. Possibly this distinction still remains undefined. The fact that this cartoon looks just like any of many cartoons evoking reconnection explicitly probably should make us realize that neither simplifying approximation adequately relates the global structure to the microphysics. This still perplexes our pundits.

      Note that this cartoon describes a "typical coronal streamer", ie the bipolar kind associated with the heliospheric current sheet. Not long after this, the "pseudo-streamers" also appeared.


[1] F. Hoyle
[2] P. Sweet

Date: 2019 November 12