BIDIRECTIONAL FLUXES OF NEARLY RELATIVISTIC ELECTRONS DURING THE ONSET OF SOLAR ENERGETIC PARTICLE EVENTS

Abstract

We report intensity and anisotropy measurements of energetic electrons in the energy range of ∼27–∼500 keV as observed with the Wind and Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) spacecraft in 2000 June for several solar energetic particle (SEP) events. The solar sources of the SEP events are inferred from observations from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory spacecraft. All of the events originate from the western limb active regions (ARs), which are well connected by interplanetary magnetic field (IMF) lines linking the Sun to near-Earth space. The observations on board Wind show bimodal pitch angle distributions (PADs), whereas ACE shows PADs with one peak, as is usually observed for impulsive injection of electrons at the Sun. During the time of observations, Wind was located, upstream of the Earth’s bow shock in the dawn-noon sector, at distances of ∼40–∼80 RE from the Earth, and we infer that it was magnetically connected to the quasi-parallel bow shock. Meanwhile, ACE, orbiting the Sun–Earth libration point L1, was not connected to the bow shock. The electron intensity–time profiles and the energy spectra show that the backstreaming electrons observed at Wind are not of magnetospheric origin. The observations suggest rather that the bidirectional electron fluxes are due to reflection or scattering by an obstacle located at a distance of less than ∼150 RE in the anti-sunward direction, which is compatible with the obstacle being the Earth’s bow shock or magnetosheath.