Conductive Heating of the Solar Wind. II. The Inner Corona.

New numerical solutions to the Navier-Stokes equations are used to describe the streaming solar atmosphere. It is argued that no external heat input is needed beyond about 2 Ro if the coronal base temperature is near 1.5 X 100 K and the plasma has a uniform 10 per cent concentration of helium. In the subsonic region, thermal conduction dominates the flow and viscous effects are unimportant. The transition to supersonic flow occurs near 7 Ro, and beyond this radius viscous forces are extremely significant. It is shown that solutions to the inviscid model are singular and that they are not related to the limiting solutions for small, but finite, viscosity.