We previously reported an association between childhood leukaemia in Britain and proximity of the child's address at birth to high-voltage power lines that declines from the 1960s to the 2000s. We test here whether a 'corona-ion hypothesis' could explain these results. This hypothesis proposes that corona ions, atmospheric ions produced by power lines and blown away from them by the wind, incre...

Figure 1: Schematic illustration (not to scale) of a black hole–accretion disk–corona–wind–relativistic jet system. Two possible configurations for the magnetic field are depicted: A partially ordered + chaotic magnetic field is shown on the left; an ordered magnetic field on the right. The distribution of the corona is indicative. Possible locations of dissipative regions leading to high energ...

Dissipation of turbulence is generally considered as a prime candidate for the heating and acceleration of solar wind from the corona throughout the heliosphere, due to radially evolving dissipation processes and/or cascading of energy to dissipation scales. In order to model the latter consistently, we must consider the evolution of cross-helicity when modeling the strength of the cascade, as ...

The solar wind carries magnetic flux from the photosphere into the heliosphere, making it topologically open in the corona. Open magnetic flux is unevenly distributed at the solar surface, but at some distance in the outer corona it becomes uniformly distributed and approximately radial. Standard potential field models do not provide such uniform distribution of open flux in the heliosphere. A ...

Using data obtained between 1991 and 1996 with the SWICS instrument (Solar Wind Ion Composition Spectrometer) aboard the Ulysses spacecraft, a long time average of the (4He/3He) isotopic ratio of 2450 ± 460 in coronal hole dominated solar wind is derived. To assess the influence of inefficient Coulomb friction in the inner corona and to infer the solar photospheric abundance ratio from the sola...

A wide swath of North America was reminded during last summer’s eclipse that you can’t stare at the sun without protection. But to study the sun, space probes have to do much more than stare. They have to get extremely close to the sun’s unforgiving environs. Next year, two solar missions will do exactly that— traveling tens of millions of miles to study the sun’s outer atmosphere, its corona, ...

The most fundamental problem in solar system research is still unsolved: how can the Sun with a surface temperature of only 5800 K heat up its atmosphere to more than a million K? In fact, the solar atmosphere is so hot that not even the Sun’s enormous gravity can contain it. Part of it is continuously evaporating into interplanetary space: the SOLAR WIND. As a highly ionized magnetized plasma ...

We consider modulations of mass captured by the compact object from the companion star’s stellar wind in Low Mass X-ray Binaries with late type giants. Based on 3D simulations with two different hydrodynamic codes used Lagrangian and Eulerian approaches – the SPH code GADGET and the Eulerian code PLUTO, we conclude that a hydrodynamical interaction of the wind matter within a binary system even...