English

Irregular proton injection to high energies at interplanetary shocks

Space Physics 2023-10-18 v1 High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena

Abstract

How thermal particles are accelerated to suprathermal energies is an unsolved issue, crucial for many astrophysical systems. We report novel observations of irregular, dispersive enhancements of the suprathermal particle population upstream of a high-Mach number interplanetary shock. We interpret the observed behavior as irregular "injections" of suprathermal particles resulting from shock front irregularities. Our findings, directly compared to self-consistent simulation results, provide important insights for the study of remote astrophysical systems where shock structuring is often neglected.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2310.11390,
  title  = {Irregular proton injection to high energies at interplanetary shocks},
  author = {Domenico Trotta and Timothy S. Horbury and David Lario and Rami Vainio and Nina Dresing and Andrew Dimmock and Joe Giacalone and Heli Hietala and Robert F. Wimmer-Schweingruber and Lars Berger and Liu Yang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.11390},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

Accepted in ApJL