VARIABILITY OF PLASMA IN THE HELIOSHEATH

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 heliosh...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Richardson, John D. (Contributor)
Other Authors: MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research (Contributor)
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: IOP Publishing, 2015-02-26T18:27:22Z.
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Online Access:Get fulltext
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100 1 0 |a Richardson, John D.  |e author 
100 1 0 |a MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research  |e contributor 
100 1 0 |a Richardson, John D.  |e contributor 
245 0 0 |a VARIABILITY OF PLASMA IN THE HELIOSHEATH 
260 |b IOP Publishing,   |c 2015-02-26T18:27:22Z. 
856 |z Get fulltext  |u http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/95669 
520 |a 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. 
520 |a United States. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Jet Propulsion Laboratory (U.S.). Contract 959203) 
520 |a United States. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Grant NNX08AE49G) 
520 |a National Natural Science Foundation (China) (Grant 40921063) 
520 |a Specialized Research Fund for State Key Laboratories (China) 
546 |a en_US 
655 7 |a Article 
773 |t Astrophysical Journal