Anisotropic microstructure near the sun

Details Anisotropic microstructure near the sun Anisotropic microstructure near the sun

Jul 1996

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1996aipc..382..264c&link_type=abstract

Proceedings of the eigth international solar wind conference: Solar wind eight. AIP Conference Proceedings, Volume 382, pp. 264

Physics

Solar Wind Plasma, Sources Of Solar Wind, Plasma Turbulence

Scientific paper

Radio scattering observations provide a means of measuring a two-dimensional projection of the three-dimensional spatial spectrum of electron density, i.e., in the plane perpendicular to the line of sight. Earlier observations have shown that the microstructure at scales of the order of 10 km becomes highly field-aligned inside of 10 Rsolar [Armstrong et al., 1990]. Earlier work has also shown that density fluctuations at scales larger than 1000 km have a Kolmogorov spectrum, whereas the smaller scale structure has a flatter spectrum and is considerably enhanced above the Kolmogorov ``background'' [Coles et al., 1991]. Here we present new observations made during 1990 and 1992. These confirm the earlier work, which was restricted to one source on a few days, but they suggest that the anisotropy changes abruptly near 6 Rsolar which was not clear in the earlier data. The axial ratio measurements are shown on Figure 1 below. The new observations were made with a more uniform sampling of the spatial plane. They show that contours of constant correlation are elliptical. This is apparently inconsistent with the spatial correlation of the ISEE-3 magnetic field which shows a ``Maltese Cross'' shape [Matthaeus et al., 1990]. However this inconsistency may be only apparent: the magnetic field and density correlations need not have the same shape; the scale of the magnetic field correlations is at least 4 orders of magnitude larger; they are much further from the sun; and they are point measurements whereas ours are path-integrated. We also made two simultaneous measurements, at 10 Rsolar, of the anisotropy on scales of 200 to 4000 km. Significant anisotropy was seen on the smaller scales, but the larger scale structure was essentially isotropic. This suggests that the process responsible for the anisotropic microstructure is independent of the larger scale isotropic turbulence. It is then tempting to speculate that the damping of this anisotropic process inside of 6 Rsolar contributes to the acceleration of the solar wind.

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