Restrictions on radial magnetic field and flow solutions for the solar wind

In Parker's original model, the solar wind is represented as a spherically symmetric hydrodynamic flow. The velocity is radially directed and decoupled from the magnetic field. The simple extension of this model to include a dependence on the polar angle, , is shown to be invalid for radial flow and radial magnetic field. This work demonstrates how ad hoc symmetry conditions imposed to simplify a non-linear problem can be incompatible with the basic hydromagnetic equations.