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Published March 2009 | public
Journal Article

The Solar Wind in the Outer Heliosphere

Abstract

The solar wind evolves as it moves outward due to interactions with both itself and with the circum-heliospheric interstellar medium. The speed is, on average, constant out to 30 AU, then starts a slow decrease due to the pickup of interstellar neutrals. These neutrals reduce the solar wind speed by about 20% before the termination shock (TS). The pickup ions heat the thermal plasma so that the solar wind temperature increases outside 20–30 AU. Solar cycle effects are important; the solar wind pressure changes by a factor of 2 over a solar cycle and the structure of the solar wind is modified by interplanetary coronal mass ejections (ICMEs) near solar maximum. The first direct evidences of the TS were the observations of streaming energetic particles by both Voyagers 1 and 2 beginning about 2 years before their respective TS crossings. The second evidence was a slowdown in solar wind speed commencing 80 days before Voyager 2 crossed the TS. The TS was a weak, quasi-perpendicular shock which transferred the solar wind flow energy mainly to the pickup ions. The heliosheath has large fluctuations in the plasma and magnetic field on time scales of minutes to days.

Additional Information

© 2009 Springer. Received: 22 May 2008. Accepted: 18 September 2008. Published online: 11 October 2008. This work was supported by NASA; at MIT by NASA contract 959203 from JPL to MIT and NASA grant NAG5-8947.

Additional details

Created:
August 21, 2023
Modified:
October 19, 2023