VARIABILITY OF PLASMA IN THE HELIOSHEATH
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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.
Date issued
2011-10Department
MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space ResearchJournal
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
ISSN
0004-637X
1538-4357