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Current Sheets, Plasmoids and Flux Ropes in the Heliosphere

Part I. 2-D or not 2-D? General and Observational Aspects

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Abstract

Recent accumulation of a critical mass of observational material from different spacecraft complete with the enhanced abilities of numerical methods have led to a boom of studies revealing the high complexity of processes occurring in the heliosphere. Views on the solar wind filling the interplanetary medium have dramatically developed from the beginning of the space era. A 2-D picture of the freely expanding solar corona and non-interacting solar wind structures described as planar or spherically-symmetric objects has dominated for decades. Meanwhile, the scientific community gradually moved to a modern understanding of the importance of the 3-D nature of heliospheric processes and their studies via MHD/kinetic simulations, as well as observations of large-scale flows and streams both in situ and remotely, in white light and/or via interplanetary scintillations. The new 3-D approach has provided an opportunity to understand the dynamics of heliospheric structures and processes that could not even be imagined before within the 2-D paradigm. In this review, we highlight a piece of the puzzle, showing the evolution of views on processes related to current sheets, plasmoids, blobs and flux ropes of various scales and origins in the heliosphere. The first part of the review focuses on introducing these plasma structures, discussing their key properties, and paying special attention to their observations in different space plasmas.

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Data Availability

All data and material used are from public open-access data depositories and archives (see Acknowledgements for details).

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Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to the International Space Science Institute (ISSI) for support of the studies of International Team 405 titled “Current Sheets, Turbulence, Structures and Particle Acceleration in the Heliosphere” (http://www.issibern.ch/teams/structpartaccel/index.html) in 2017–2019. O.K., H.M., R.K., and L.Z. are supported by RSCF grant No. 20-42-04418. O.P. thanks Dr. D. Trotta and Dr. F. Catapano for the friendly and precious conversations on some of the topics discussed in the review. S.S. acknowledges the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement No. 776262 (AIDA, www.aida-space.eu). J. Le R. acknowledges support from NASA Grant 80NSSC19K027, NSF-DOE grant PHY-1707247, and NSF EPSCoR RII-Track-1 Cooperative Agreement OIA-1655280.

The authors thank the Helioviewer project team (https://helioviewer-project.github.io/). The Helioviewer website images (https://helioviewer.org/) are used in Fig. 11. We thank the HelioWeather project team for providing images and movies at the WSA-ENLIL-DONKI-HELCATS – Solar Wind and CMEs archive (http://www.helioweather.net/archive/2012/03/stb1dej.html). The archive’s open-access material is used in Figs. 15 and 22. The Wind and ACE spacecraft data used in Figs. 1, 7, 22, 29, 37 are from https://cdaweb.gsfc.nasa.gov/istp_public/ (thanks to the CDAWeb team). We thank the authors of figures and material used in the review for their tremendous and inspiring work. Figure 13d and Fig. 36c are used under ©ESO 2018. Figure 10b, Fig. 13b, Figs. 23c and 24d are used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. Figure 10a, Fig. 12c, Fig. 15, and Fig. 23d are used under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Figure 3c is reprinted under License Number (LN) 5030790709342, and Fig. 3b – under LN 5030791253352 obtained from https://www.copyright.com. Figure 5: LN 5030800647340; Fig. 6a and Fig. 9a: License LN 5030801081368; Fig. 6b and Fig. 9b: LN 5030801440402. Figure 7a: LN 5030810306882. Figure 8b: LN 5030820100527. Figure 12b: LN 5030861183349. Figure 13a: LN 5030881477005. Figure 13c: LN 5030890789749. Figure 23a: LN 5030901197411; Fig. 23b: LN 5030910243037. Figure 24b: LN 5030911166948 and LN 5030911362867; Fig. 25: LN 5031611008025. Figure 30: LN 5030931339325. Figure 35: LN 5030940784082. Figure 36ab: LN 5030941083300.

Funding

Funding is provided by the Russian Science Fundation (RSCF), grant No. 20-42-04418 (contributors: O.K., H.M., R.K., and L.Z.). S.S. is supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement No. 776262 (AIDA, www.aida-space.eu). J. Le R. is supported by NASA Grant 80NSSC19K027, NSF-DOE grant PHY-1707247, and NSF EPSCoR RII-Track-1 Cooperative Agreement OIA-1655280.

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Correspondence to O. Khabarova.

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Khabarova, O., Malandraki, O., Malova, H. et al. Current Sheets, Plasmoids and Flux Ropes in the Heliosphere. Space Sci Rev 217, 38 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11214-021-00814-x

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