Solar-Wind Drag on Fluffy Dust Particles

Details Solar-Wind Drag on Fluffy Dust Particles Solar-Wind Drag on Fluffy Dust Particles

Dec 2004

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2004agufmsh43b..05m&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2004, abstract #SH43B-05

Physics

2100 Interplanetary Physics, 2129 Interplanetary Dust, 2164 Solar Wind Plasma

Scientific paper

The impact of solar-wind particles on dust grains exerts not only a repulsive force but also a drag force on the grains, called the plasma Poynting-Robertson effect. The drag force decreases the orbital angular momentum of the grains and limits their lifetime in a manner similar to the photon Poynting-Robertson effect. We study the solar-wind drag and the lifetime of fluffy silicate and carbon dust aggregates. We calculate the momentum transfer cross section of the fluffy dust aggregate for the impinging solar wind taking into account the penetration of incident solar wind ions. We find that 1) the cross section of very small aggregates is approximately proportional to the volume of the grains and independent of their shape, while 2) the cross section of large aggregates approaches the geometrical cross section. The lifetime of the aggregates against both plasma and photon drag forces is shorter than that of spherical particles of the same mass. We show that the plasma Poynting-Robertson effect for aggregates is comparable to and in some cases more effective than the (photon) Poynting-Robertson effect. The importance of the plasma drag compared to the photon drag increases as the size of constituent particles of the aggregate decreases, irrespective of the passage of solar-wind ions through the dust grains. This contradicts the general understanding that the lifetime of dust particles is limited by the photon Poynting-Robertson effect.

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