Nonlinear electrostatic structures associated with Saturn's bow shock

Details Nonlinear electrostatic structures associated with Saturn's bow shock Nonlinear electrostatic structures associated with Saturn's bow shock

Dec 2004

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2004agufm.p51a1410c&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2004, abstract #P51A-1410

Physics

6275 Saturn, 2154 Planetary Bow Shocks, 2712 Electric Fields (2411), 2728 Magnetosheath, 2784 Solar Wind/Magnetosphere Interactions

Scientific paper

We report on nonlinear electrostatic structures including pulse chains and isolated pulses observed to be abundant at the bow shock transition layer and the downstream magnetosheath of Saturn. The characteristic time scales involved in these nonlinear structures are 5-10 ms. Pulse chains, isolated pulses, and large amplitude (up to ˜ 10 mV/m) fluctuations of very similar time scales are also observed to be the dominant waveforms in the downstream bow shock current layer at Earth. Considering the widely different densities and magnetic field strengths in the two magnetosheaths, we rule out those wave modes whose characteristic frequencies scale with the plasma frequency or the cyclotron frequency. The only parameters that are comparable in the two magnetosheaths are the plasma streaming velocity and the electron temperature. We therefore conclude that the responsible wave mode is the low frequency (below the ion plasma frequency) ion acoustic mode. The solitary unipolar, bipolar, and tripolar electric-field structures of these time scales are thus most likely to be nonlinear descendants of low frequency ion acoustic waves. These nonlinear electrostatic structures may hold important information on how a collisionless shock boundary is formed and sustained.

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