Evolution of solar-type stellar winds

By extending our self-consistent MHD simulations for the solar wind, we study the evolution of stellar winds of solar-type stars from early main sequence stage to red giant phase. Young solar-type stars are active and the mass loss rates are larger by up to similar to 100 times than that of the present-day sun. We investigate how the stellar wind is affected when the magnetic field strength and fluctuation amplitude at the photosphere increase. While the mass loss rate sensitively depends on the input energy from the surface because of the global instability related to the reflection and nonlinear dissipation of Alfven waves, it saturates at similar to 100 times because most of the energy is used up for the radiative losses rather than the kinetic energy of the wind. After the end of the main sequence phase when the stellar radius expands by similar to 10 times, the steady hot corona with temperature 10(6) K, suddenly disappears. Chromospheric materials, with hot bubbles embedded owing to thermal instability, directly stream out; the red giant wind is not a steady stream but a structured outflow. (C) 2013 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim