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

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.

7 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (3)

• A generalized two-component model of solar wind turbulence and ab initio diffusion mean free paths and drift lengthscales of cosmic rays
• Magnetic turbulence spectra and intermittency in the heliosheath and in the local interstellar medium
• Implementing turbulence transport in the CRONOS framework and application to the propagation of CMEs

Cited by in corpus (5)

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• On the anisotropic velocity distribution of newborn pickup ions in the heliosheath
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• Parallel Collisionless Shocks in strongly Magnetized Electron-Ion Plasma. I. Temperature anisotropies
• Olbertian partition function in scalar field theory