Diagnosing Pickup Ion Distributions beyond the Termination Shock through Ener-getic Neutral Atoms

Details Diagnosing Pickup Ion Distributions beyond the Termination Shock through Ener-getic Neutral Atoms Diagnosing Pickup Ion Distributions beyond the Termination Shock through Ener-getic Neutral Atoms

Dec 2008

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2008agufmsh21b1607m&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2008, abstract #SH21B-1607

Physics

2124 Heliopause And Solar Wind Termination, 2144 Interstellar Gas, 2151 Neutral Particles (7837), 2152 Pickup Ions, 2194 Instruments And Techniques

Scientific paper

The solar wind accumulates interstellar pickup ions throughout the heliosphere, which can be described with an isotropic velocity distribution in the plasma frame with a cut-off at the solar wind speed. This distribution is then transported across the termination shock where it is slowed down and heated, thus producing a distribution with a significant portion of ions that show velocity components towards the Sun. In the interaction with the interstellar gas flow through the heliosphere a fraction of these pickup ions is turned into energetic neutral atoms (ENAs), the sunward pointing portion of which can then be observed by ENA sensors in the inner heliosphere, such as instruments on Mars Express, STEREO, and IBEX. In this contribution we generate a simplified analytical model of the pickup ions and their ENA counterparts for a hydrodynamic flow pattern in the heliosheath. The energy distribution of the ENAs is sensitive to the radial component of the heliosheath flow. The attempt is made to predict spatial patterns of the ENA spectra based on the heliosheath flow pattern for comparison with future IBEX maps. These patterns will also be compared with angular variations and temporal changes in the recently published ENA observations with STEREO STE (Wang, L., R.P. Lin, D.E. Larson, J. Luhman, Nature, 454, 81-83, 2008).

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