分类： 地球科学 >> 空间物理学 提交时间： 2016-12-22
摘要： In 2012 March the Sun exhibited extraordinary activities. In particular, the active region NOAA AR 11429 emitted a series of large coronal mass ejections (CMEs) which were imaged by the Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory as it rotated with the Sun from the east to west. These sustained eruptions are expected to generate a global shell of disturbed material sweeping through the heliosphere. A cluster of shocks and interplanetary CMEs were observed near the Earth, and are propagated outward from 1 AU using an MHD model. The transient streams interact with each other, which erases memory of the source and results in a large merged interaction region (MIR) with a preceding shock. The MHD model predicts that the shock and MIR would reach 120 AU around 2013 April 22, which agrees well with the period of radio emissions and the time of a transient disturbance in galactic cosmic rays detected by Voyager 1. These results are important for understanding the "fate" of CMEs in the outer heliosphere and provide confidence that the heliopause is located around 120 AU from the Sun.
分类： 地球科学 >> 空间物理学 提交时间： 2016-05-12
摘要： Voyager 2 (V2) observed multiple crossings of the heliospheric termination shock (TS) on 2007 August 31-September 1 at a distance of 84 AU from the Sun. Here, for the first time, we present two-dimensional particle-incell (PIC) simulations of the TS self-consistently including pickup ions (PUIs), and compare the simulation results with V2 observations. We find that (1) PUIs play a key role in the energy dissipation of the TS, and most of the incident ion kinetic energy is transferred to the thermal energy of PUIs. The PIC simulation indicates that, for the upstream parameters chosen for V2 conditions, the density of PUIs is about 25% and the PUIs gain the largest fraction (approximately 86.6%) of downstream thermal pressure. (2) The simulated heliosheath ion distribution function is a superposition of a cold core formed by transmitted solar wind ions (SWIs), with the shoulders contributed by the hot reflected SWIs and directly transmitted PUIs, and the wings of the distribution dominated by the very hot reflected PUIs. The V2 Faraday cups observed the cool core of the distribution, and so they only saw the tip of the iceberg. (3) The nonstationarity of the shock front is mainly caused by ripples along the shock front which form even if the percentage of PUIs is high. These simulation results agree reasonably well with the V2 experimental data. The relevance of the shock front ripples to the multiple TS crossings observed by V2 is also discussed in this paper.
分类： 地球科学 >> 空间物理学 提交时间： 2016-05-12
摘要： The solar wind is observed to display high speeds in high heliolatitude coronal holes and low speeds near the ecliptic plane. The heliospheric magnetic field associated with the solar wind plays a very important role in the transport and modulation of charged energetic particles, including galactic cosmic rays (GCRs) and solar energetic particles (SEPs), in the three-dimensional heliosphere. In previous studies, a constant solar wind speed, which is independent of heliolatitude, was assumed and commonly used in modulation modeling of cosmic rays. In this work, we investigate the realistic latitudinally dependent solar wind speed and utilize the theoretical models in hyperbolic and piecewise polynomial forms to explore the important effects on the heliospheric magnetic field and the diffusion coefficients (parallel, perpendicular, and drift scale) of cosmic rays in the presence of adiabatic focusing. Comparisons of the diffusion coefficients derived from standard Parker field and modified magnetic fields are presented. Since the structures and properties of different solar wind sources (coronal streamer belt, polar coronal hole, and transition region between them) differ from each other in essence, we suggest that the latitudinally dependent solar wind speed and the corresponding heliospheric magnetic field and diffusion coefficients with adiabatic focusing should be employed in the global modeling studies of GCRs and SEPs in the heliosphere.
分类： 地球科学 >> 空间物理学 提交时间： 2016-05-12
摘要： Based on a hybrid galactic cosmic-ray transport model, which incorporated MHD global heliospheric data into Parker's cosmic-ray transport equation, we studied the behavior of the transport of galactic cosmic rays and the corresponding gradients in their flux near the heliopause (HP). We found that, (1) by increasing the ratio of the parallel diffusion coefficient to the perpendicular diffusion coefficient in the interstellar magnetic field of the outer heliosheath, the simulated radial flux near the HP increases as well. As the ratio multiplying factor reached 1010, the radial flux experienced a sudden jump near the HP, similar to what Voyager 1 observed in 2012. (2) The effect of changing the diffusion coefficients' ratio on the radial flux variation depends on the energy of the cosmic rays, the lower the energy, the more pronounced the effect is. (3) The magnitude of the diffusion coefficients also affect the radial flux near the HP, the modulation beyond the HP varies by adjusting the magnitude multiplying factor.
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