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PROPERTIES OF TURBULENCE IN THE VERY LOCAL INTERSTELLAR CLOUDS
Journal article   Open access   Peer reviewed

PROPERTIES OF TURBULENCE IN THE VERY LOCAL INTERSTELLAR CLOUDS

Steven R Spangler, Allison H Savage and Seth Redfield
The Astrophysical journal, Vol.742(1), 30
2011
DOI: 10.1088/0004-637X/742/1/30
url
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1105.5077View
Open Access

Abstract

We have investigated the degree to which turbulence in the Very Local Interstellar Clouds resembles the highly studied turbulence in the solar corona and the solar wind, particularly the high-speed solar wind. The turbulence diagnostics for the Local Clouds are the absorption line widths measured along 32 lines of sight to nearby stars, yielding measurements for 53 absorption components. We have tested whether the Local Cloud turbulence has the following properties of turbulence in the solar corona or the solar wind: (1) velocity fluctuations mainly perpendicular to the average magnetic field, (2) a temperature anisotropy in the sense that the perpendicular temperature is larger than the parallel temperature (or at least enhanced relative to expectation), and (3) an ion temperature which is dependent on the ion Larmor radius, in the sense that more massive ions have higher temperatures. Our analysis of the data does not show compelling evidence for any of these properties in Local Cloud turbulence, indicating possible differences with the aforementioned heliospheric plasmas. In the case of anisotropy of velocity fluctuations, although the expected observational signature is not seen, we cannot exclude the possibility of relatively high degrees of anisotropy (anisotropy parameter ε ∼ 0.50-0.70), if some other process in the Local Clouds is causing variations in the turbulent line width from one line of sight to another. We briefly consider possible reasons for differences between heliospheric turbulence and that in the Local Clouds. The apparent absence of anisotropy of the velocity fluctuations and ion temperature might be due to randomization of the interstellar magnetic field on spatial scales ∼ 10pc, but this would not explain the absence of ion mass dependence in the ion temperature. A likely explanation for the absence of temperature anisotropy and mass-proportional temperature in the Local Clouds, and the presence of these effects in the corona and high-speed solar wind, is the greater collisionality, due to ion-neutral collisions, of the partially ionized Local Cloud plasma. © 2011. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.
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