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Register a new userInner Structure of CME Shock Fronts Revealed by the Electromotive Force and Turbulent Transport Coefficients in Helios-2 Observations
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Added by
Philippe-Andr\\'e Bourdin
Publication date
2018
fields
Physics
and research's language is
English
Authors
Philippe-A. Bourdin
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Electromotive force is an essential quantity in dynamo theory. During a coronal mass ejection (CME), magnetic helicity gets decoupled from the Sun and advected into the heliosphere with the solar wind. Eventually, a heliospheric magnetic transient event might pass by a spacecraft, such as the Helios space observatories. Our aim is to investigate the electromotive force, the kinetic helicity effect ($alpha$ term), the turbulent diffusion ($beta$ term) and the cross-helicity effect ($gamma$ term) in the inner heliosphere below 1 au. We set up a one-dimensional model of the solar wind velocity and magnetic field for a hypothetic interplanetary CME. Because turbulent structures within the solar wind evolve much slower than this structure needs to pass by the spacecraft, we use a reduced curl operator to compute the current density and vorticity. We test our CME shock-front model against an observed magnetic transient that passes by the Helios-2 spacecraft. At the peak of the fluctuations in this event we find strongly enhanced $alpha$, $beta$ and $gamma$ terms, as well as a strong peak in the total electromotive force. Our method allows us to automatically identify magnetic transient events from any in-situ spacecraft observations that contain magnetic field and plasma velocity data of the solar wind.
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We use STEREO imagery to study the morphology of a shock driven by a fast coronal mass ejection (CME) launched from the Sun on 2011 March 7. The source region of the CME is located just to the east of a coronal hole. The CME ejecta is deflected away from the hole, in contrast with the shock, which readily expands into the fast outflow from the coronal hole. The result is a CME with ejecta not well centered within the shock surrounding it. The shock shape inferred from the imaging is compared with in situ data at 1 AU, where the shock is observed near Earth by the Wind spacecraft, and at STEREO-A. Shock normals computed from the in situ data are consistent with the shock morphology inferred from imaging.
The shape of the electron velocity distribution function plays an important role in the dynamics of the solar wind acceleration. Electrons are normally modelled with three components, the core, the halo, and the strahl. We investigate how well the fast strahl electrons in the inner heliosphere preserve the information about the coronal electron temperature at their origin. We analysed the data obtained by two missions, Helios spanning the distances between 65 and 215 R$_S$, and Parker Solar Probe (PSP) reaching down to 35 R$_S$ during its first two orbits around the Sun. The electron strahl was characterised with two parameters, pitch-angle width (PAW), and the strahl parallel temperature (T$_{sparallel}$). PSP observations confirm the already reported dependence of strahl PAW on core parallel plasma beta ($beta_{ecparallel}$)citep{Bercic2019}. Most of the strahl measured by PSP appear narrow with PAW reaching down to 30$^o$. The portion of the strahl velocity distribution function aligned with the magnetic field is for the measured energy range well described by a Maxwellian distribution function. T$_{sparallel}$ was found to be anti-correlated with the solar wind velocity, and independent of radial distance. These observations imply that T$_{sparallel}$ carries the information about the coronal electron temperature. The obtained values are in agreement with coronal temperatures measured using spectroscopy (David et al. 2998), and the inferred solar wind source regions during the first orbit of PSP agree with the predictions using a PFSS model (Bale et al. 2019, Badman et al. 2019).
We perform a mean-field analysis of the EULAG-MHD millenium simulation of global magnetohydrodynamical convection presented in Passos et al. 2014. The turbulent electromotive force operating in the simulation is assumed to be linearly related to the cyclic axisymmetric mean magnetic field and its first spatial derivatives. At every grid point in the simulations meridional plane, this assumed relationship involves 27 independent tensorial coefficients. Expanding on Racine et al. 2011, we extract these coefficients from the simulation data through a least-squares minimization procedure based on singular value decomposition. The reconstructed alpha-tensor shows good agreement with that obtained by Racine et al. 2011, who did not include derivatives of the mean-field in their fit, as well as with the alpha-tensor extracted by Augustson et al. 2015 from a distinct ASH MHD simulation. The isotropic part of the turbulent magnetic diffusivity tensor beta is positive definite and reaches values of 5.0x10^7 m2s-1 in the middle of the convecting fluid layers. The spatial variations of both alpha_phiphi and beta_phiphi component are well reproduced by expressions obtained under the SOCA, with a good matching of amplitude requiring a turbulent correlation time about five times smaller than the estimated turnover time of the small-scale turbulent flow. We find the magnetic quenching of the alpha-effect to be driven primarily by a reduction of the small-scale flows kinetic helicity, with variations of the current helicity playing a lesser role in most locations in the simulation domain. Our measurements of turbulent diffusivity quenching are restricted to the beta_phiphi component, but indicate a weaker quenching, by a factor of 1.36, than of the alpha effect, which in our simulation drops by a factor of three between the minimum and maximum phases of the magnetic cycle.
The shock structure of a plasmoid in magnetic reconnection in low-beta plasmas is investigated by two-dimensional magnetohydrodynamic simulations. Using a high-accuracy code with unprecedented resolution, shocks, discontinuities, and their intersections are resolved and clarified. Contact discontinuities emanate from triple-shock intersection points, separating fluids of different origins. Shock-diamonds inside the plasmoid appear to decelerate a supersonic flow. New shock-diamonds and a slow expansion fan are found inside the Petschek outflow. A sufficient condition for the new shock-diamonds and the relevance to astrophysical jets are discussed.
Eruptive activity in the solar corona can often lead to the propagation of shock waves. In the radio domain the primary signature of such shocks are type II radio bursts, observed in dynamic spectra as bands of emission slowly drifting towards lower frequencies over time. These radio bursts can sometimes have inhomogeneous and fragmented fine structure, but the cause of this fine structure is currently unclear. Here we observe a type II radio burst on 2019-March-20th using the New Extension in Nanc{c}ay Upgrading LOFAR (NenuFAR), a radio interferometer observing between 10-85 MHz. We show that the distribution of size-scales of density perturbations associated with the type II fine structure follows a power law with a spectral index in the range of $alpha=-1.7$ to -2.0, which closely matches the value of $-5/3$ expected of fully developed turbulence. We determine this turbulence to be upstream of the shock, in background coronal plasma at a heliocentric distance of $sim$2 R$_{odot}$. The observed inertial size-scales of the turbulent density inhomogeneities range from $sim$62 Mm to $sim$209 km. This shows that type II fine structure and fragmentation can be due to shock propagation through an inhomogeneous and turbulent coronal plasma, and we discuss the implications of this on electron acceleration in the coronal shock.
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