Letter to the Editor

Shock-wave heating mechanism of the distant solar wind: Explanation of Voyager-2 data

¹ Space Research Institute (IKI) of Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia
e-mail: korolkov.msu@mail.ru; izmod@iki.rssi.ru
² Lomonosov Moscow State University, Moscow center for fundamental and applied mathematics, Moscow, Russia
³ HSE University, 20 Myasnitskaya Ulitsa, Moscow 101000, Russia

Received: 16 July 2022
Accepted: 23 October 2022

Abstract

Aims. One of the important discoveries made by Voyager-2 is the nonadiabatic radial profile of the solar wind proton temperature. This phenomenon has been studied for several decades. The dissipation of turbulence energy has been proposed as the main physical process responsible for the temperature profile. The turbulence is both convected with the solar wind and originated in the solar wind by the compressions and shears in the flows and by pick-up ions. The compression source of the solar wind heating in the outer heliosphere appears due to shock waves, which originated either in the solar corona or in the solar wind itself. The goal of this work is to demonstrate that the shock-wave heating itself is enough to explain the temperature profile obtained by Voyager-2.

Methods. The effect of shock-wave heating is demonstrated in the frame of a very simple spherically symmetric high-resolution (in both space and time) gas-dynamical data-driven solar wind model. This data-driven model employs the solar-wind parameters at 1 AU with minute resolution. The data are taken from the NASA OMNIWeb database. It is important to underline that (1) the model captures the shocks traveling and/or originating in the solar wind, and (2) other sources of heating are not taken into account in the model. We extended this simple model to the magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) and two-component models and found very similar results.

Results. The results of the numerical modeling with the one-minute OMNI data as the boundary condition show very good agreement with the solar-wind temperature profiles obtained by Voyager-2. It is also noteworthy that the numerical results with daily averaged OMNI data show a very similar temperature profile, while the numerical runs with 27-day-averaged OMNI data demonstrate the adiabatic behavior of the temperature.