The Neutral Hydrogen Abundance and Ionization in the Inner Heliosphere

Details The Neutral Hydrogen Abundance and Ionization in the Inner Heliosphere The Neutral Hydrogen Abundance and Ionization in the Inner Heliosphere

May 1997

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1997apj...480..262p&link_type=abstract

Astrophysical Journal v.480, p.262

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

9

Interplanetary Medium, Ism: Abundances, Ultraviolet: Ism

Scientific paper

We have developed a new and self-consistent method to simultaneously derive the abundance of interplanetary hydrogen and its rate of ionization by the solar environment. Using the principle of invariance and the solar Ly alpha activity, we show that some properties of the interplanetary medium radiation field in the inner heliosphere depend uniquely on the ionization rate beta and the local density and can therefore be derived by a self-consistent technique. Thanks to Voyager and IUE Ly alpha sky maps, we show that the H distribution in the solar neighborhood is well described by a hot model, characterized by nlocal = 0.159 +/-0.05 cm-3 at 10 AU and beta = (5.50 +/- 1.65) x 10-7 s-1 near the period of maximum solar activity. When extrapolated to the outer region of the heliosphere, the same hot model provides a lower density limit of n∞ = 0.25 +/- 0.08 cm-3. Any filtration effect should increase the density. Although our estimate of the ionization rate corresponds to the solar activity of the analyzed period, the IPM density derived is far larger than previously claimed since the discovery of the interplanetary medium 20 yr ago.

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