SPRG Seminars
February 16, 2010:
" Solar Wind Dissipation across Earth's Bow Shock "
George Parks, University of California, Berkeley, Space Sciences Laboratory
This talk will discuss new observations of how the solar wind dissipates energy across the bow shock. We have a new detector that shows the SW beam can often penetrate deep into the magnetosheath (MS) and the change of the temperature can be very small, ~1.5 eV, indicating very little thermalization occurs across the bow shock. We also find MS ions are flowing at super-Alfvénic speeds most of the time (~85%) and significant heat flux is measured for both ions and electrons indicating MS is not in thermal equilibrium. We suggest that the hotter MS plasma comes from heating of SW particles by waves generated by the unstable MS plasma distributions.