Stansby, D; Yeates, A; Badman, S; (2020) pfsspy: A Python package for potential field source surface modelling. Journal of Open Source Software , 5 (54) , Article 2732. 10.21105/joss.02732.

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Abstract

Magnetic fields play a crucial role in the dynamics and evolution of our Sun and other stars. A common method used to model the magnetic fields in solar and stellar atmospheres is the potential field source surface (PFSS) model (Altschuler & Newkirk, 1969; Schatten, Wilcox, & Ness, 1969). The PFSS equations assume that there is zero electrical current in the domain of interest, leading to the equations // ∇ · B = 0; ∇ × B = 0 (1) // These are solved in a spherical shell between the surface of the star and a configurable outer radius called the ‘source surface’. Boundary conditions are given by the user specified radial component of B on the inner boundary and the imposed condition of a purely radial field on the source surface, which mimics the effect of the escaping stellar wind. Historically, either custom implementations or the pfsspack1 IDL library have been used to perform PFSS extrapolations. As Python has become a major programming language within the solar physics and wider astronomy community (Bobra et al., 2020), there is a need to provide well documented and tested functionality to perform PFSS extrapolations within the Python ecosystem, a niche that pfsspy fills.

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