Plotting a parker spiral?

Hello,

Does anyone possibly know how to plot a Parker (Archimedean) spiral in reference to heliospheric current sheets studied in space physics. If so, could anyone point me in the right direction of where to begin plotting it on Matlab?

Thank you!

Answer 1

[Image Analyst]

Do you have an equation for it? Maybe you should look at quiver()? Or check out the MATLAB Plot Gallery

[Zoe Zontos]

In regards to an equation, it's:

where:

I've been able to plot a basic spiral, but I'm not really sure how plotting r in the first equation is supposed to look.

[Image Analyst]

Try this:

t = 1 : 1000; % A thousand points.
u = 0.10;
r0 = 50;
% Compute radius as a function of time.
r = r0 + u * t;

omega = .060
phi0 = 3
phi = -omega*t+phi0
x = r .* cos(phi);
y = r .* sin(phi);
plot(x, y, 'LineWidth', 2);
grid on;

[Zoe Zontos]

Thank you so much!