  Recent observations of the solar corona with the LASCO coronagraph on board
of the SOHO spacecraft have revealed the occurrence of triple helmet streamers
even during solar minimum, which occasionally go unstable and give rise to
large coronal mass ejections. There are also indications that the slow solar
wind is either a combination of a quasi-stationary flow and a highly
fluctuating component or may even be caused completely by many small eruptions
or instabilities. As a first step we recently presented an analytical method to
calculate simple two-dimensional stationary models of triple helmet streamer
configurations. In the present contribution we use the equations of time-
dependent resistive magnetohydrodynamics to investigate the stability and the
dynamical behaviour of these configurations. We particularly focus on the
possible differences between the dynamics of single isolated streamers and
triple streamers and on the way in which magnetic reconnection initiates both
small scale and large scale dynamical behaviour of the streamers. Our results
indicate that small eruptions at the helmet streamer cusp may incessantly
accelerate small amounts of plasma without significant changes of the
equilibrium configuration and might thus contribute to the non-stationary slow
solar wind. On larger time and length scales, large coronal eruptions can occur
as a consequence of large scale magnetic reconnection events inside the
streamer configuration. Our results also show that triple streamers are usually
more stable than a single streamer.
