Issue |
A&A
Volume 671, March 2023
|
|
---|---|---|
Article Number | A144 | |
Number of page(s) | 11 | |
Section | Planets and planetary systems | |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202244455 | |
Published online | 20 March 2023 |
Interaction between the turbulent solar wind and a planetary magnetosphere: A 2D comet example
1
Swedish Institute of Space Physics,
Box 812,
981 28
Kiruna,
Sweden
e-mail: etienne.behar@irf.se
2
Lagrange, CNRS, OCA, Université Côte d’Azur, Boulevard de l’Observatoire,
06088
Nice,
France
3
LPC2E, CNRS, Univ. Orléans, CNES,
45071
Orléans
France
Received:
8
July
2022
Accepted:
13
January
2023
Context. Using the newly developed code Menura, we present the first global picture of the interaction between a turbulent solar wind and a planetary obstacle in our solar system, namely a comet.
Aims. This first publication sheds light on the macroscopic effect of the upstream solar wind turbulence on the induced magnetosphere of a comet.
Methods. Using a hybrid particle-in-cell simulation code, we modelled a medium activity comet using turbulent and laminar solar wind input, for a direct comparison between the two regimes.
Results. We show how the turbulent characteristics of the solar wind lead to a smaller obstacle size. We then present how the upstream turbulent structures, traced by the perpendicular magnetic field fluctuations absent in the laminar case, self-consistently drape and pile up around the denser inner coma, forming intense plasmoids downstream of the nucleus, pulling away dense cometary ion bubbles. This pseudo-periodic erosion phenomenon re-channels the global cometary ion escape; as a result, the innermost coma is found to be on average 45% less dense in the turbulent case than predicted by simulating a laminar upstream flow.
Key words: plasmas / turbulence / comets: general
© The Authors 2023
Open Access article, published by EDP Sciences, under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
This article is published in open access under the Subscribe to Open model. Subscribe to A&A to support open access publication.
Current usage metrics show cumulative count of Article Views (full-text article views including HTML views, PDF and ePub downloads, according to the available data) and Abstracts Views on Vision4Press platform.
Data correspond to usage on the plateform after 2015. The current usage metrics is available 48-96 hours after online publication and is updated daily on week days.
Initial download of the metrics may take a while.