VARIABILITY OF PLASMA IN THE HELIOSHEATH
Name
Richardson-2011-Variability of plasm.pdf
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1.07 MB
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Adobe PDF
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Author(s)
Richardson, John D.
Date Issued
October 2011
Journal
Astrophysical Journal
Publisher
IOP Publishing
Citation
Richardson, J. D. “VARIABILITY OF PLASMA IN THE HELIOSHEATH.” The Astrophysical Journal 740, no. 2 (October 4, 2011): 113. © 2011 The American Astronomical Society
Version
Final published version
Abstract
The heliosheath is the shocked solar wind between the termination shock and the heliopause. Plasma properties are highly variable in this region, with factor-of-two variations of density and thermal speed on timescales from tens of minutes to hours to days. Gaussian distributions fit all the heliosheath plasma data well and are used to quantify these variations. We show that these fits can be used to compensate for data lost due to cutoffs in the instrument response and show that the flow angle in the RT plane is about 50% larger than previous determinations. The turbulent component of the flow has about 25% of the flow energy in the heliosheath, but this energy is not a significant percentage of the upstream solar wind flow energy.
MIT Department
MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research
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Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1088/0004-637x/740/2/113
