Working Group 3 Report: Coronal Hole Boundaries and Interactions with Adjacent Regions

Summarized below are the discussions of working group 3 on "Coronal hole boundaries and interactions with adjacent regions" which took place at the 7th SOHO workshop in Northeast Harbor, Maine, USA, 28 September to 1 October 1998. A number of recent observational and theoretical results were presented during the discussions to shed light on different aspects of coronal hole boundaries. The working group also included presentations on streamers and coronal holes to emphasis the difference between the plasma properties in these regions, and to serve as guidelines for the definition of the boundaries. Observations, particularly white light observations, show that multiple streamers are present close to the solar limb at all times. At some distance from the sun, typically below 2 R, these streamers merge into a relatively narrow sheet as seen, for example, in LASCO and UVCS images. The presence of multiple current sheets in interplanetary space was also briefly addressed. Coronal hole boundaries were defined as the abrupt transition from the bright appearing plasma sheet to the dark coronal hole regions. Observations in the inner corona seem to indicate a transition of typically 10 to 20 degrees, whereas observations in interplanetary space, carried out from Ulysses, show on one hand an even faster transition of less than 2 degrees which is in agreement with earlier Helios results. On the other hand, these observations also show that the transition happens on different scales, some of which are significantly larger. The slow solar wind is connected to the streamer belt/plasma sheet, even though the discussions were still not conclusive on the point where exactly the slow solar wind originates. Considered the high variability of plasma characteristics in slow wind streams, it seems most likely that several types of coronal regions produce slow solar wind, such as streamer stalks, streamer legs and open field regions between active regions, and maybe even regions just inside of the coronal holes. Observational and theoretical studies presented during the discussions show evidence that each of these regions may indeed contribute to the solar slow wind. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.