TURBULENT HEATING OF THE DISTANT SOLAR WIND BY INTERSTELLAR PICKUP PROTONS IN A DECELERATING FLOW
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Author(s)
Isenberg, Philip A.
Smith, Charles W.
Matthaeus, William H.
Richardson, John D.
Date Issued
August 2010
Journal
Astrophysical Journal
Publisher
Institute of Physics/American Astronomical Society
Citation
Isenberg, Philip A., Charles W. Smith, William H. Matthaeus, and John D. Richardson. “TURBULENT HEATING OF THE DISTANT SOLAR WIND BY INTERSTELLAR PICKUP PROTONS IN A DECELERATING FLOW.” The Astrophysical Journal 719, no. 1 (July 22, 2010): 716–721. © 2010 American Astronomical Society.
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Final published version
Abstract
Previous models of solar wind heating by interstellar pickup proton-driven turbulence have assumed that the wind speed is a constant in heliocentric radial position. However, the same pickup process, which is taken to provide the turbulent energy, must also decelerate the wind. In this paper, we extend our phenomenological turbulence model to include variable wind speed, and then incorporate the deceleration due to interstellar pickup protons into the model. We compare the model results with plasma and field data from Voyager 2, taking this opportunity to present an extended and improved data set of proton core temperature, magnetic field fluctuation intensity, and correlation length along the Voyager trajectory. A particular motivation for including the solar wind deceleration in this model is the expectation that a slower wind would reduce the resulting proton core temperature in the region beyond ~60 AU, where the previous model predictions were higher than the observed values. However, we find instead that the deceleration of the steady-state wind increases the energy input to the turbulence, causing even higher temperatures in that region. The increased heating is shown to result from the larger values of the ratio of Alfven speed to solar wind speed that develop in the decelerating wind.
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/719/1/716
