Abstract
The orbital motion of interplanetary dust grains in sublimation zone near the Sun is revised in detail for grains of obsidian, basalt, astronomical silicate and graphite. Effects of gravity, radiation pressure for a spherical source with limb darkening, and solar wind pressure on dust grains were taken into account. The influence of sputtering, thermal velocity and tangential velocity component of the solar wind particles on lifetime of the grains moving on prograde and retrograde orbits is investigated. It is obtained that β = radiation pressure/gravity is constant everywhere including the region close to the Sun. It is shown that the temperature of submicron dust grains does not exceed 1500 K for silicate grains and 2000 K for graphite ones anywhere in solar corona. Both the dust rings observed near 9r⊙ and the dust free zone near 6.5r⊙ can be explained by basalt-like grains. These dust rings and those observed earlier near 4r⊙, formed by obsidian-like grains, were not found during the solar eclipse in 1991. This is possible if the bulk of the grains belong to population II (Le Sergeant D'Hendecourt and Lamy, 1980) (in this case small particles with radii s < 0.5 μm do not form a region of high concentration) of if dust have a cometary origin. Dust grains with optical properties similar to astronomical silicate sublimating far from the Sun, go onto elliptic orbits and reach the Earth. These grains can be candidates for α-meteoroids) (“apex” particles) with the mass 10−12 g which were observed in the inner Solar System during Helios ½ missions.