On the transmission of turbulent structures across the Earth's Bow Shock

Abstract

Collisionless shocks and plasma turbulence are crucial ingredients for a broad range of astrophysical systems. The shock-turbulence interaction, and in particular the transmission of fully developed turbulence across the quasi-perpendicular Earth's bow shock, is here addressed using a combination of spacecraft observations and local numerical simulations. An alignment between the Wind (upstream) and MMS (downstream) spacecraft is used to study the transmission of turbulent structures across the shock, revealing an increase of their magnetic helicity content in its downstream. Local kinetic simulations, in which the dynamics of turbulent structures is followed through their transmission across a perpendicular shock, confirm this scenario, revealing that the observed magnetic helicity increase is associated with the compression of turbulent structures at the shock front.

9 Pages, 4 Figures

References in corpus (6)

• Identification of Magnetic Flux Ropes from Parker Solar Probe Observations during the First Encounter
• Shocks and non-thermal particles in clusters of galaxies
• The Acceleration of Electrons at Collisionless Shocks Moving Through a Turbulent Magnetic Field
• First observations of irregular surface of interplanetary shocks at ion scales by Cluster
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Cited by in corpus (2)

• Multi-spacecraft observations of shocklets at an interplanetary shock
• Interpretation of flat energy spectra upstream of fast interplanetary shocks