Interaction between the turbulent solar wind and a planetary magnetosphere: a 2D comet example

Abstract

Using the newly developed code \emph{Menura}, we present the first global picture of the interaction between a turbulent solar wind and a planetary obstacle in our solar system, namely a comet. This first publication aims at shedding lights on the macroscopic effect of the upstream solar wind turbulence on the induced magnetosphere of a comet. Using a hybrid Particle In Cell simulation code, we model a medium activity comet, using both a turbulent and a laminar solar wind input, for a direct comparison between the two regimes. We show how the turbulent characteristics of the solar wind lead to a smaller obstacle size. We then present how the upstream turbulent structures, traced by the perpendicular magnetic field fluctuations absent in the laminar case, self-consistently drape and pile-up around the denser inner coma, forming intense plasmoids downstream of the nucleus, pulling away dense cometary ion bubbles. This pseudo-periodic erosion phenomenon re-channels the global cometary ion escape and as a result, the innermost coma is found to be on average 45\% less dense in the turbulent case than predicted by simulating a laminar upstream flow.

References in corpus (5)

• High-resolution hybrid simulations of kinetic plasma turbulence at proton scales
• The Role of Turbulence in Coronal Heating and Solar Wind Expansion
• Solar wind turbulent cascade from MHD to sub-ion scales: large-size 3D hybrid particle-in-cell simulations
• Solar wind dynamics around a comet - A 2D semi-analytical kinetic model
• The root of a comet tail - Rosetta ion observations at comet 67P/Churyumov--Gerasimenko

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Impact of solar wind turbulence on a planetary bow shock