A two-fluid model of the solar wind termination shock modified by shock-generated cosmic rays including energy losses

Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics

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Interplanetary Medium, Plasmas, Shocks, Cosmic Rays

Scientific paper

We consider the formation of the heliospheric termination shock in a two-fluid approximation including the selfconsistent dynamic interaction of the thermal solar wind ion plasma and a shock-generated high energy cosmic ray gas representing the so-called anomalous cosmic ray component. Due to the diffusive interaction of the two media an extended structure of the shock is formed consisting of a precursor region and a gas dynamic sub-shock. Pick-up ions, convected with the thermal plasma to the sub-shock, at a fraction η serve there as a seed for high energy particles which by first order Fermi acceleration in the shock-induced wave turbulences are energized from KeV- to MeV-energies. Here we treat in a consistent manner the spatial diffusion of such high energy particles in the resulting solar wind flow structure and therefore solve a coupled system of differential equations adequately describing mass-, momentum-, and energy-flow continuities for both the low and the high energy plasma component. The energy loss due to the leakage of high energy particles upstream from the shock structure is taken into account. In the results we then can show how the shock-generated, energetic cosmic ray particles influence the structure of the shock. We demonstrate the variation of the compression ratio in the termination shock as function of the conversion efficiency η and on the mean energy of the shock-generated cosmic ray particles. Furthermore we discuss the influence of the energy loss due to the upstream leakage of shock-generated, high energy particles on the dimension of the heliosheath plasma, i.e. on the distance between the termination shock and the heliopause. As it turns out from our calculations the upwind heliosheath dimension can be reduced by up to 25 percent for high conversion efficiencies.

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