Browsing by Subject "Interplanetary physics"
Now showing items 1-9 of 9
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(2013)In this paper we have analyzed a substructure found within a leading part of a north–south-oriented magnetic cloud (MC) observed on 3–4 September 2008 in the near-Earth solar wind by multiple spacecraft (ACE, Wind, THEMIS B and C). The MC was preceded by a stream interface (SI) and followed by a high-speed stream (HSS). The identified substructure featured a strong depletion of suprathermal halo electrons and showed distinct magnetic field and plasma signatures. It occurred where suprathermal electron flow within a cloud changed from bidirectional to unidirectional, indicating change in the field line connectivity to the Sun. We found that the substructure maintained roughly its integrity from the first Lagrangian point to the vicinity of the Earth's bow shock in the front edge of the MC, but revealed small changes in the structure which could be explained either by temporal evolution or spatial configuration of the spacecraft.
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(2016)Planar magnetic structures (PMSs) are periods in the solar wind during which interplanetary magnetic field vectors are nearly parallel to a single plane. One of the specific regions where PMSs have been reported are coronal mass ejection (CME)-driven sheaths. We use here an automated method to identify PMSs in 95 CME sheath regions observed in situ by the Wind and ACE spacecraft between 1997 and 2015. The occurrence and location of the PMSs are related to various shock, sheath, and CME properties. We find that PMSs are ubiquitous in CME sheaths; 85% of the studied sheath regions had PMSs with the mean duration of 6 h. In about one-third of the cases the magnetic field vectors followed a single PMS plane that covered a significant part (at least 67%) of the sheath region. Our analysis gives strong support for two suggested PMS formation mechanisms: the amplification and alignment of solar wind discontinuities near the CME-driven shock and the draping of the magnetic field lines around the CME ejecta. For example, we found that the shock and PMS plane normals generally coincided for the events where the PMSs occurred near the shock (68% of the PMS plane normals near the shock were separated by less than 20 degrees from the shock normal), while deviations were clearly larger when PMSs occurred close to the ejecta leading edge. In addition, PMSs near the shock were generally associated with lower upstream plasma beta than the cases where PMSs occurred near the leading edge of the CME. We also demonstrate that the planar parts of the sheath contain a higher amount of strong southward magnetic field than the non-planar parts, suggesting that planar sheaths are more likely to drive magnetospheric activity.
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(2018)We present a comprehensive statistical analysis of mirror mode waves and the properties of their plasma surroundings in sheath regions driven by interplanetary coronal mass ejection (ICME). We have constructed a semi-automated method to identify mirror modes from the magnetic field data. We analyze 91 ICME sheath regions from January 1997 to April 2015 using data from the Wind spacecraft. The results imply that similarly to planetary magnetosheaths, mirror modes are also common structures in ICME sheaths. However, they occur almost exclusively as dip-like structures and in mirror stable plasma. We observe mirror modes throughout the sheath, from the bow shock to the ICME leading edge, but their amplitudes are largest closest to the shock. We also find that the shock strength (measured by Alfven Mach number) is the most important parameter in controlling the occurrence of mirror modes. Our findings suggest that in ICME sheaths the dominant source of free energy for mirror mode generation is the shock compression. We also suggest that mirror modes that are found deeper in the sheath are remnants from earlier times of the sheath evolution, generated also in the vicinity of the shock.
