English

On the Generation of Compressible Mirror-mode Fluctuations in the Inner Heliosheath

Space Physics 2020-10-29 v2 Solar and Stellar Astrophysics

Abstract

Measurements made with the Voyager 1 spacecraft indicate that significant levels of compressive fluctuations exist in the inner heliosheath. Some studies have already been performed with respect to the mirror-mode instability in the downstream region close to the solar wind termination shock, and here we extend the investigation to the whole inner heliosheath. We employ quasilinear theory and results from a global magnetohydrodynamic model of the heliosphere to compute the time evolution of both the temperature anisotropy and the energy density of the corresponding magnetic fluctuations, and we demonstrate their likely presence in the inner heliosheath. Furthermore, we compute the associated, locally generated density fluctuations. The results can serve as inputs for future models of the transport of compressible turbulence in the inner heliosheath.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2010.04264,
  title  = {On the Generation of Compressible Mirror-mode Fluctuations in the Inner Heliosheath},
  author = {Horst Fichtner and Jens Kleimann and Peter H. Yoon and Klaus Scherer and Sean Oughton and N. Eugene Engelbrecht},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2010.04264},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

7 pages, 5 figures