Large-Scale Variation of Solar Wind Electron Properties from Quasi-Thermal Noise Spectroscopy: Ulysses Measurements

Abstract

The transport of energy in space plasmas, especially in the solar wind, is far from being understood. Measuring the temperature of the electrons and their non-thermal properties is essential to understand the transport properties in collisionless plasmas. Quasi-thermal noise spectroscopy is a reliable tool for measuring the electron temperature accurately since it is less sensitive to the spacecraft perturbations than particle detectors. We apply this method to Ulysses radio data obtained during the first pole-to-pole fast latitude scan in the high-speed solar wind, using a kappa function to describe the electron velocity distribution. We deduce the variations with heliocentric distance between 1.5 and 2.3 AU in the fast solar wind at high latitude in terms of three fitting parameters: the electron density varies as ne∝R−1.96±0.08, the electron temperature as Te∝R−0.53±0.15, and the kappa index of the distribution remains constant at κ=2.0±0.2. These observations agree with the predictions of the exospheric theory.