Cosmic radiation does not prevent collisional charging in (Pre)-Planetary Atmospheres
arXiv:2010.04016 · doi:10.1016/j.icarus.2020.114127
Abstract
In (pre)-planetary environments, dust and sand grains regularly collide. They electrically charge and discharge during these events. In this work, we study if cosmic radiation has any influence on the equilibrium charge state on timescales of minutes. We developed an experiment that was carried out during the ascent of a stratospheric balloon. With increasing altitude, the radiation activity increases by a factor of 54. However, we found only a very minor decrease in grain charges of up to 30%. This implies that charge-moderated processes from thunderstorms on Earth, over early phases of planet formation to particle motion on the Martian surface on short timescales essentially proceed unhindered from a direct influence of cosmic radiation.
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Cited by in corpus (6)
- A Smoking Gun for Planetesimal Formation: Charge Driven Growth into a New Size Range
- Observation of bottom-up formation for charged grain aggregates related to pre-planetary evolution beyond the bouncing barrier
- Measuring Electric Dipole Moments of Trapped Sub-mm Particles
- Violation of triboelectric charge conservation on colliding particles
- Lifting of Tribocharged Grains by Martian Winds
- Clusters of tribocharged dust aggregates as pebbles in protoplanetary disks