Tongues, bottles, and disconnected loops: The opening and closing of the interplanetary magnetic field

摘要

For years the field of Space Physics has had a problem, a really big problem for it occurs on the largest spatial scales in Space physics -- across the entire region under the Sun's influence, the heliosphere. The problem is that the Sun appears to keep opening new magnetic flux into interplanetary space with no obvious way for this flux to close back off again. This state of affairs, without some previously unknown method for closing the open interplanetary magnetic field (IMF), leads to an ever growing amount of magnetic flux in interplanetary space: the magnetic flux catastrophe. Recently, considerable progress has been made in understanding why this catastrophic state is not the observed state of the heliosphere. This brief article paints the newly emerging picture of the opening and closing of the IMF and how these processes may account for the observed variation in the amount of magnetic flux in interplanetary space over the solar cycle.