Knowledge of coronal heating and solar-wind acceleration obtained from observations of the solar wind near 1 AU

Clues to the nature of the mechanisms responsible for heating the corona and accelerating the solar wind can be obtained by contrasting the properties of the quasi-stationary and transient states of the solar wind. Substantial differences exist in the proton temperatures and anisotropies, the entropy, the field strength, the Alfvenicity of fluctuations in the field, the distribution of MHD discontinuities, and the helium abundance of the two types of flow. Those differences are displayed as a function of the solar wind speed. Several signals of wave acceleration can be found in the data for quasi-stationary flows. The relatively smooth velocity dependences of proton temperature, helium abundance, and frequency of occurrence of rotational discontinuities suggest that the acceleration mechanisms for flow from coronal holes, coronal streamers, and the quasi-stationary low-speed flows between them may be basically the same, differing only in degree.