A Reassessment of Turbulent Heating Due to Interstellar Pickup Protons in the Outer Heliosphere

Physics

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2149 Mhd Waves And Turbulence, 2152 Pickup Ions, 2164 Solar Wind Plasma, 7863 Turbulence, 7867 Wave/Particle Interactions

Scientific paper

The measurements of the solar wind core proton temperature at Voyager 2 exhibit a sharp and continuing increase beyond 40 AU from the Sun. The location of this feature suggests a connection with the pickup of inflowing interstellar hydrogen. Recent papers by Matthaeus, Smith, Zank and co-workers have discussed the possibility that this temperature increase is due to the turbulent dissipation of fluctuations originally generated by the scattering of pickup protons to a bispherical shell soon after their ionization. However, the turbulent evolution model used in those papers was shown to strongly overestimate the observed heating unless the energy input from pickup-proton-generated waves was reduced from the bispherical values by at least a factor of 25 - 50. We point out that the original quasilinear analysis of this wave generation, under the usual assumptions of conditions in the outer heliosphere, actually yields zero net energy input for this process. We show how relaxing these assumptions can plausibly allow for energy input to the turbulent cascade at a level of a few percent of the bispherical value, thus resulting in a model solar wind heating consistent with the observations.

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