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Published November 14, 2006 | Published
Journal Article Open

Correlation between energetic ion enhancements and heliospheric current sheet crossings in the outer heliosphere

Abstract

Voyagers 1 and 2 observed highly-variable beams of energetic ions in the foreshock region upstream of the termination shock (TS). At Voyager 2 (V2), the ion intensities are generally not related to the plasma properties. At Voyager 1 (V1), the beams are often coincident with crossings of the heliospheric current sheet (HCS). The V1 intensity peaks occur when the HCS is crossed from negative to positive magnetic polarities and V1 is within a few AU of the TS. Two mechanisms are considered: current sheet drift and streaming of ions from the TS along magnetic field lines which are parallel to the HCS. The current sheet drift hypothesis predicts that enhancements observed at V2 will occur when the HCS is crossed in the opposite direction, from positive to negative magnetic polarity, since V2 is at southern heliolatitudes.

Additional Information

© 2006 The American Geophysical Union. Received 14 July 2006; Revised 8 September 2006; Accepted 4 October 2006; Published 14 November 2006. This work was supported at M.I.T. under NASA contract 959203 from JPL to MIT and at Caltech by NASA contract NAS7-03001. N. F. Ness was partially supported by grant NNG04GB71G to the Catholic University of America. M. Zhang was supported by NASA grant NNG06G122G. This work was also supported in part by the International Collaboration Research Team Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

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August 19, 2023
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