Aspects of the mass distribution of interstellar dust grains in the solar system from in situ measurements

Abstract

The in situ detection of interstellar dust grains in the solar system by the dust instruments on‐board the Ulysses and Galileo spacecraft as well as the recent measurements of hyperbolic radar meteors give information on the properties of the interstellar solid particle population in the solar vicinity. Especially the distribution of grain masses is indicative of growth and destruction mechanisms that govern the grain evolution in the interstellar medium. The mass of an impacting dust grain is derived from its impact velocity and the amount of plasma generated by the impact. Because the initial velocity and the dynamics of interstellar particles in the solar system are well known, we use an approximated theoretical instead of the measured impact velocity to derive the mass of interstellar grains from the Ulysses and Galileo in situ data. The revised mass distributions are steeper and thus contain less large grains than the ones that use measured impact velocities, but large grains still contribute significantly to the overall mass of the detected grains. The flux of interstellar grains with masses > 10−14 kg is determined to be 1 × 10−6 m−2 s−1. The comparison of radar data with the extrapolation of the Ulysses and Galileo mass distribution indicates that the very large (m > 10−10 kg) hyperbolic meteoroids detected by the radar are not kinematically related to the interstellar dust population detected by the spacecraft.