A mechanism for the formation of knots, kinks and discontinuous events in the plasma tail of comets

Details A mechanism for the formation of knots, kinks and discontinuous events in the plasma tail of comets A mechanism for the formation of knots, kinks and discontinuous events in the plasma tail of comets

Aug 1989

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1989stin...9021707w&link_type=abstract

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Physics

Comet Tails, Comets, Variations, Evolution (Development), Solar Wind

Scientific paper

In this paper, we investigate the growth rates and eigenmodes of the streaming sausage, kink and tearing instabilities in the plasma tail of comets. The results show that both the sausage and kink modes can be excited by the sheared plasma flow, which is low at the centre of the plasma sheet and high on the two sides of the plasma sheet. The streaming sausage mode grows faster than the streaming kink mode when betaL less than 1.5. When betaL greater than 1.5, the streaming kink instability has a higher growth rate. The instability condition for both the streaming sausage and kink modes is found to be VL greater than or approx. 1.2 VAL. Here betaL is the ratio between the plasma and magnetic pressures, VAL, the Alfven velocity and VL, the plasma flow velocity in the lobes of the cometary tail. In the presence of a finite resistivity, the streaming sausage mode evolves into the streaming tearing mode, which leads to the formation of magnetic islands. We suggest that some of the knots, kinks and disconnection events observed in the plasma tail of comets may be associated with the streaming sausage, kink and tearing instabilities, respectively.

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