Interstellar Dust Inside and Outside the Heliosphere

Abstract

In the early 1990s, after its Jupiter flyby, the Ulysses spacecraft identified interstellar dust in the solar system. Since then the in-situ dust detector on board Ulysses continuously monitored interstellar grains with masses up to 10e-13 kg, penetrating deep into the solar system. While Ulysses measured the interstellar dust stream at high ecliptic latitudes between 3 and 5 AU, interstellar impactors were also measured with the in-situ dust detectors on board Cassini, Galileo and Helios, covering a heliocentric distance range between 0.3 and 3 AU in the ecliptic plane. The interstellar dust stream in the inner solar system is altered by the solar radiation pressure force, gravitational focussing and interaction of charged grains with the time varying interplanetary magnetic field. The grains act as tracers of the physical conditions in the local interstellar cloud (LIC). Our in-situ measurements imply the existence of a population of 'big' interstellar grains (up to 10e-13 kg) and a gas-to-dust-mass ratio in the LIC which is a factor of > 2 larger than the one derived from astronomical observations, indicating a concentration of interstellar dust in the very local interstellar medium. Until 2004, the interstellar dust flow direction measured by Ulysses was close to the mean apex of the Sun's motion through the LIC, while in 2005, the data showed a 30 deg shift, the reason of which is presently unknown. We review the results from spacecraft-based in-situ interstellar dust measurements in the solar system and their implications for the physical and chemical state of the LIC.

10 pages, 2 b/w figures, 1 colour figure; submitted to Space Science Reviews

References in corpus (18)

• Interstellar Dust Grains
• The Structure of the Local Interstellar Medium V: Electron Densities
• Dust in the Local Interstellar Wind
• Aspects of the Mass Distribution of Interstellar Dust Grains in the Solar System from In-Situ Measurements
• Modeling the Motion and Distribution of Interstellar Dust inside the Heliosphere
• The Structure of the Local Interstellar Medium. III. Temperature and Turbulence
• The Structure of the Local Interstellar Medium. II. Observations of D I, C II, N I, O I, Al II, and Si II toward Stars within 100 parsecs
• The Chemical Composition and Gas-to-Dust Mass Ratio of Nearby Interstellar Matter
• Local clouds: ionization, temperatures, electron densities and interfaces, from GHRS and IMAPS spectra of epsilon Canis Majoris
• Interstellar Dust in the Solar System
• Collisional Consequences of Big Interstellar Grains
• Four years of Ulysses dust data: 1996 to 1999
• An Unexplained 10 Degree - 40 Degree Shift in the Location of Some Diverse Neutral Atom Data at 1 AU
• Local Interstellar Matter: The Apex Cloud
• Evidence for a High Carbon Abundance in the Local Interstellar Cloud
• In Situ Measurements of Interstellar Dust
• Interstellar Matter and the Boundary Conditions of the Heliosphere
• The Galactic Environments of Nearby Cool Stars

Cited by in corpus (28)

• Aspects of the Mass Distribution of Interstellar Dust Grains in the Solar System from In-Situ Measurements
• Modeling the Motion and Distribution of Interstellar Dust inside the Heliosphere
• The Size-Frequency Distribution of the Zodiacal Cloud: Evidence from the Solar System Dust Bands
• What are little worlds made of? Stellar abundances and the building blocks of planets
• Interstellar Dust in the Solar System
• Prediction of the In-Situ Dust Measurements of the Stardust Mission to Comet 81P/Wild 2
• Three years of Ulysses dust data: 2005 to 2007
• Four years of Ulysses dust data: 1996 to 1999
• The Dawn of Dust Astronomy
• Modelling DESTINY+ interplanetary and interstellar dust measurements en route to the active asteroid (3200) Phaethon
• Possible Interstellar meteoroids detected by the Canadian Meteor Orbit Radar
• Project Icarus: A Review of Local Interstellar Medium Properties of Relevance for Space Missions to the Nearest Stars
• The Dynamics of Dust Grains in the Outer Solar System
• A Search for Resonant Structures in the Zodiacal Cloud with COBE DIRBE: The Mars Wake and Jupiter's Trojan Clouds
• Debris cloud of India Anti-Satellite Test to Microsat-R Satellite
• Is the Sun Embedded in a Typical Interstellar Cloud?
• Revisiting the lifetime estimate of large presolar grains in the interstellar medium
• The Effect of a Magnetic Field on the Dynamics of Debris Discs Around White Dwarfs
• Small and Very Small Interstellar Grains
• A theoretical model for electromagnetic characterization of a spherical dust molecular cloud equilibrium structure
• A Comment on "The Far Future of Exoplanet Direct Characterization" - the Case for Interstellar Space Probes
• Magnetopause displacements: The possible role of dust
• Three years of Ulysses dust data: 1993 to 1995
• A Single Physical Model for Diverse Meteoroid Data Sets
• Cosmic Dust: The Ulysses perspective
• The Galactic Environments of Cool Stars - part I: Modeling Interstellar Dust around the Sun and Nearby Cool Stars
• Contemporary interstellar meteoroids in the solar system - in situ measurements and clues on composition
• What is the amount of baryonic dark matter in galaxies?