Small-scale magnetic flux ropes in the solar wind

DOI

We have developed a new automated small-scale magnetic flux ropes (SSMFR) detection algorithm based on the Grad-Shafranov (GS) reconstruction technique. We have applied this detection algorithm to the Wind spacecraft in situ measurements during 1996-2016, covering two solar cycles, and successfully detected a total number of 74241 small-scale magnetic flux rope events with duration from 9 to 361min. This large number of small-scale magnetic flux ropes has not been discovered by any other previous studies through this unique approach. We perform statistical analysis of the small-scale magnetic flux rope events based on our newly developed database, and summarize the main findings as follows. (1) The occurrence of small-scale flux ropes has strong solar-cycle dependency with a rate of a few hundred per month on average. (2) The small-scale magnetic flux ropes in the ecliptic plane tend to align along the Parker spiral. (3) In low-speed (=400km/s) solar wind, they tend to have higher proton temperature and lower proton number density. (4) Both the duration and scale size distributions of the small-scale magnetic flux ropes obey a power law. (5) The waiting time distribution of small-scale magnetic flux ropes can be fitted by an exponential function (for shorter waiting times) and a power-law function (for longer waiting times). (6) The wall-to-wall time distribution obeys double power laws with the break point at 60 minutes (corresponding to the correlation length). (7) The small-scale magnetic flux ropes tend to accumulate near the heliospheric current sheet (HCS).

Identifier
DOI http://doi.org/10.26093/cds/vizier.22390012
Source https://dc.g-vo.org/rr/q/lp/custom/CDS.VizieR/J/ApJS/239/12
Related Identifier https://cdsarc.cds.unistra.fr/viz-bin/cat/J/ApJS/239/12
Related Identifier https://vizier.cds.unistra.fr/viz-bin/VizieR-2?-source=J/ApJS/239/12
Metadata Access http://dc.g-vo.org/rr/q/pmh/pubreg.xml?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_b2find&identifier=ivo://CDS.VizieR/J/ApJS/239/12
Provenance
Creator Hu Q.; Zheng J.; Chen Yu; le Roux J.; Zhao L.
Publisher CDS
Publication Year 2019
Rights https://cds.unistra.fr/vizier-org/licences_vizier.html
OpenAccess true
Contact CDS support team <cds-question(at)unistra.fr>
Representation
Resource Type Dataset; AstroObjects
Discipline Astrophysical Processes; Astrophysics and Astronomy; Natural Sciences; Physics; Solar System Astronomy