Heliolatitudinal and time variations of the solar wind mass flux: inferences from the backscattered solar Lyman-alpha intensity maps
Résumé
Recently Sokół et al. (2012) have presented a reconstruction of heliolatitudinal and time variations of the solar wind speed and density. Method of the reconstruction was based on i) measurements of the interplanetary scintillations, ii) OMNI-2 solar wind data in the ecliptic plane, iii) Ulysses solar wind data out of the ecliptic plane. In this paper we use hydrogen charge exchange rates derived from their results as input parameters to calculate the interstellar hydrogen distribution in the heliosphere in the frame of our 3D time-dependent kinetic model. The hydrogen distribution is then used to calculate the backscattered solar Lyman-alpha intensity maps. The theoretical Lyman-alpha maps are compared with the SOHO/SWAN measurements during maximum and minimum of the solar cycle activity. We found that in the solar minimum there is a quite good agreement between the model results and the SWAN data, but in the solar maximum sky maps of the Lyman-alpha intensities are qualitatively different for the model results and observations. Physical reasons of the differences are discussed.
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