It is well known, that the Sun as central star of our solar system
gravitationally controls the orbits of planets and minor bodies. Much
less known is the domain of plasma fields and charged particles,
however, in which the Sun with a radius of less than 0.7 Million km
governs the heliosphere out to about 15 Billion km, a distance about 20
000 times larger in radius or nearly 1013 times bigger in
volume. What forces activates the Sun to maintain this power? Coronal
Mass Ejections (CMEs) and their descendants are the troops serving the
Sun during high solar activity periods.
This volume offers a comprehensive and integrated overview of our
present knowledge and understanding of Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) and
their descendants, Interplanetary CMEs (ICMEs). It results from a series
of workshops held between 2000 and 2004. An international team of about
sixty experimenters involved e.g. in the SOHO, ULYSSES, VOYAGER,
PIONEER, HELIOS, WIND, IMP, and ACE missions, ground observers, and
theoreticians worked jointly on interpreting the observations and
developing new models for CME initiations, development, and
interplanetary propagation.
The book is intended to provide scientists active in space physics
research a with an up-to-date status of the current understanding of
CMEs and ICMEs and their effects in the heliosphere, and also to serve
the advanced graduate student with introductory material on this active
field of research.
