Fractal analysis of the solar wind flow in the inner heliosphere

✍ Scribed by Wiesław M. Macek; Lidia Obojska

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1997
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 530 KB
• Volume: 8
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0960-0779
• DOI: 10.1016/s0960-0779(97)00041-6

✦ Synopsis

Abstrad-We

argue that the inner heliosphere is a chaotic system. We invoke time series analysis of the measurements by the Helios spacecraft (near the Sun) in low-speed streams. The slope of the caiculated correlation function saturates at some finite value of the embedding dimension, indicating a low-dimension of the attractor of about 3.5. Furthermore, the largest calculated positive Lyapunov exponent of -l/5 bits per data sample (40.5 s) shows sensitive dependence on initial conditions. This means that the predictability of the system is limited to about 1 h.