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Mirror modes (MMs) are ubiquitous in space plasma and grow from pressure anisotropy. Together with other instabilities, they play a fundamental role in constraining the free energy contained in the plasma. This study focuses on MMs observed in the solar wind by Solar Orbiter (SolO) for heliocentric distances between 0.5 and 1 AU. Typically, MMs have timescales from several to tens of seconds and are considered quasi-MHD structures. In the solar wind, they also generally appear as isolated structures. However, in certain conditions, prolonged and bursty trains of higher frequency MMs are measured, which have been labeled previously as MM storms. At present, only a handful of existing studies have focused on MM storms, meaning that many open questions remain. In this study, SolO has been used to investigate several key aspects of MM storms: their dependence on heliocentric distance, association with local plasma properties, temporal/spatial scale, amplitude, and connections with larger-scale solar wind transients. The main results are that MM storms often approach local ion scales and can no longer be treated as quasi-magnetohydrodynamic, thus breaking the commonly used long-wavelength assumption. They are typically observed close to current sheets and downstream of interplanetary shocks. The events were observed during slow solar wind speeds and there was a tendency for higher occurrence closer to the Sun. The occurrence is low, so they do not play a fundamental role in regulating ambient solar wind but may play a larger role inside transients.

Full Article:
Dimmock, A. P. (SHARP), Yordanova, E., Graham, D. B. (SHARP), Khotyaintsev, Y. V. (SHARP), Blanco-Cano, X., Kajdič, P., et al. (2022). Mirror mode storms observed by Solar Orbiter. Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics, 127, doi: 10.1029/2022JA030754

License: CC BY 4.0

NASA’s Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) was launched on Dec. 9, 2021. Now the first results, analysing the X-ray polarization of the young supernova remnant Cassiopeia A, have been published. SHARP members Dr. Jacco Vink and Dmitry Prokhorov are scientific members of the IXPE science team and were involved in the analysis of the first science observation done with IXPE

Read NASA’s press release here: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/ixpe/news/nasa-s-ixpe-helps-unlock-the-secrets-of-famous-exploded-star.html

Scientific publication:
Vink, J. (SHARP), Prokhorov, D. (SHARP), Ferrazzoli, R. et al. (2022). X-ray polarization detection of Cassiopeia A with IXPE. The Astrophyscial Journal, 938, doi: 10.3847/1538-4357/ac8b7b

The SHARP project organised a Shocks Workshop on October 20th and 21st at the Finnish Meteorological Institute in Helsinki, Finland. The format of the workshop was hybrid. Half of the participants attended in person, while the other half joined online. There were also participants from the related projects SERPENTINE and EUHFORIA.

The porgramme involved various talks about shock physics, an introduction to the SHARP project and presentations about recent results from the project. Besides the presentations, two discussion sessions were organised. One session focused on discussing the comparison of astrophysical and heliospheric shocks and the other session consisted of discussions on the collaboration between SERPENTINE and SHARP.

The 8th SHARP Progress meeting took place on 19th October, 2022.

Andrew Dimmock gave a presentation with the title “Solar Wind: What is it and how does it affect Earth and other planets?” at the Biotopia museum in Uppsala as part of the ‘Astronomy Day and Night’ festival, which is a space festival with events throughout Sweden. The festival is built up by organizers around Sweden who draw attention to astronomy and space travel in different ways. This year ‘Astronomy Day and Night’ had the theme of all the solar systems of the Universe.

Ion heating in collisionless shocks is non-adiabatic and efficient. The amount of heating and the downstream distributions depend on the shock parameters and on the incident ion distribution. The number of reflected ions and their distribution depend on the detailed shape of the tail of the distribution. In supercritical shocks the reflected ion contribution is significant. Kappa distributed ions are heated more strongly and have a larger fraction of reflected ions than Maxwellian distributed ions with the same upstream temperature and the same shock parameters. For kappa distributions the phase space dips are shallower.

Full Article:
Gedalin, M. (SHARP) and Ganushkina, N. (SHARP) (2022). Different heating of Maxwellian and kappa distributions at shocks. Journal of Plasma Physics, 88(5), doi: 10.1017/S0022377822000824

License: CC BY 4.0

The origin of cosmic rays is a pivotal open issue of high-energy astrophysics. Supernova remnants are strong candidates to be the Galactic factory of cosmic rays, their blast waves being powerful particle accelerators. However, supernova remnants can power the observed flux of cosmic rays only if they transfer a significant fraction of their kinetic energy to the accelerated particles, but conclusive evidence for such efficient acceleration is still lacking. In this scenario, the shock energy channeled to cosmic rays should induce a higher post-shock density than that predicted by standard shock conditions. Here we show this effect, and probe its dependence on the orientation of the ambient magnetic field, by analyzing deep X-ray observations of the Galactic remnant of SN 1006. By comparing our results with state-of-the-art models, we conclude that SN 1006 is an efficient source of cosmic rays and obtain an observational support for the quasi-parallel acceleration mechanism.

Full Article:
Giuffrida, R., Miceli, M., Caprioli, D., et al. (2022). The supernova remnant SN 1006 as a Galactic particle accelerator. Nature Communications, 13, doi: 10.1038/s41467-022-32781-4

License: CC BY 4.0

Identifying collisionless shock crossings in data sent from spacecraft has so far been done manually or using basic algorithms. It is a tedious job that shock physicists have to go through if they want to conduct case studies or perform statistical studies. We use a machine learning approach to automatically identify shock crossings from the Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) spacecraft. We compiled a database of 2,797 shock crossings, spanning a period from October 2015 to December 2020, including various spacecraft-related and shock-related parameters for each event. Furthermore, we show that the shock crossings in the database are spread out in space, from the subsolar point to the far flanks. On top of that, we show that they cover a wide range of parameter space. We also present a possible scientific application of the database by looking for correlations between ion acceleration efficiency at shocks with different shock parameters, such as the angle between the upstream magnetic field and the shock normal θ_Bn and the Alfvénic Mach number M_A. We find no clear correlation between the acceleration efficiency and M_A; however, we find that quasi-parallel shocks are more efficient at accelerating ions than quasi-perpendicular shocks.

Full Article:
Lalti, A. (SHARP), Khotyaintsev, Yu. V. (SHARP), Dimmock, A. P. (SHARP), Johlander, A. (SHARP), Graham, D. B. (SHARP), Olshevsky, V. (2022). A database of MMS bow shock crossings compiled using machine learning. Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics, 127, doi: 10.1029/2022JA030454

License: CC BY 4.0