Physics Commons^™

Heliospheric Plasma Sheets, N. U. Crooker, Chia-Lin L. Huang, S. M. Lamassa, D. E. Larson, S. W. Kahler, Harlan E. Spence

Physics & Astronomy

[1] As a high-beta feature on scales of hours or less, the heliospheric plasma sheet (HPS) encasing the heliospheric current sheet shows a high degree of variability. A study of 52 sector boundaries identified in electron pitch angle spectrograms in Wind data from 1995 reveals that only half concur with both high-beta plasma and current sheets, as required for an HPS. The remaining half lack either a plasma sheet or current sheet or both. A complementary study of 37 high-beta events reveals that only 5 contain sector boundaries while nearly all (34) contain local magnetic field reversals, however brief. We …