Analysis of auroras caused by precipitation of high energy electrons

Details Analysis of auroras caused by precipitation of high energy electrons Analysis of auroras caused by precipitation of high energy electrons

Dec 2009

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2009agufmsm41a1684l&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2009, abstract #SM41A-1684

Physics

[0310] Atmospheric Composition And Structure / Airglow And Aurora, [2407] Ionosphere / Auroral Ionosphere, [2455] Ionosphere / Particle Precipitation, [2704] Magnetospheric Physics / Auroral Phenomena

Scientific paper

It has been regarded that keV electrons precipitating into the upper atmosphere are the main source of auroral emissions. Hence, extensive efforts have been made to relate observed auroral intensity to the precipitating energy flux of these electrons while the role of the electrons above ~ 20 keV was not examined well. Our previous study showed the intensity of the long LBH (1600 Å - 1715 Å) was enhanced very much compared to that of the short LBH (1400 Å - 1500 Å) when the characteristic energy of the precipitating electrons increased from 1 keV to >7 keV, in accordance with the theoretical models. In this paper, we would like to present the results of our study for even higher energy electrons. Measurement of electrons for the energy above ~ 20 keV is technically difficult and in fact, we were unable to find any previous observations for this high energy range except the one made on STSAT-1 for the electrons of 170 ~ 360 keV. Thus, we selected the events in which the fluxes both in the low energy (100 eV ~ 20 keV) and in the high energy (170 ~ 360 keV) were enhanced, and examined the auroral spectra for these events observed simultaneously by the imaging spectrograph on the same spacecraft. While the accurate characteristic energy could not be determined because of the gap in the energy range, our result showed the intensity ratio of the long LBH to the short LBH ranged from 1.2 to 2.0 in these events, in contrast to 1.0 or smaller for the events in which the highest enhancement was seen only in the low energy. Our study suggests that intense auroras might be accompanied by high energy electrons above 20 keV.

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