Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
Jan 2012
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2012aas...21924001m&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #219, #240.01
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
Scientific paper
Solar wind charge exchange (SWCX) X-rays are emitted when highly charged solar wind ions such as O7+ collide with neutral gas. The best known examples of this occur around comets, but SWCX emission also arises in the Earth's tenuous outer atmosphere (exosphere, or geocorona) and throughout the heliosphere as neutral H and He from the interstellar medium flows into the solar system. This geocoronal and heliospheric emission comprises much of the soft X-ray background and is seen in every X-ray observation. Geocoronal emission, although usually weaker than heliospheric emission, arises within a few Earth radii and therefore responds much more quickly (on time scales of less than an hour) to changes in solar wind intensity than the widely distributed heliospheric emission.
We are studying roughly a dozen time periods since the launch of the Chandra X-ray Observatory in 1999 when the flux of O7+ in the solar wind (measured by the Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) satellite) was at its highest. These gusts of wind usually last only a short time and quickly fade, leading to corresponding abrupt changes in geocoronal SWCX X-ray emission. These changes may or may not be seen by X-ray observatories depending on their line of sight through the magnetosphere. We present here preliminary results of our study of the temporal correlation between solar wind flux and the X-ray background emission measured by Chandra.
Martin Poppy
Wargelin Bradford J.
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