Radial evolution of nonthermal electron populations in the low-latitude solar wind: Helios, Cluster, and Ulysses Observations

Abstract

We have performed a statistical study of a substantial amount of solar wind electron velocity distribution functions (eVDFs). In our data set, we combine measurements acquired onboard three spacecrafts (Helios, Cluster II, and Ulysses) in the low ecliptic latitudes covering the heliocentric distance from 0.3 up to 4 AU. In this study, we focus on the nonthermal properties of the measured eVDFs in both the slow and the fast solar wind regimes. The aim of the present study is (1) to provide, for the first time, an analytical model to fit separately all three components of the solar wind eVDFs (i.e., the core, the halo, and the strahl) and (2) to study the fractional densities of the three electron components and also the non-Maxwellian character of the high-energy eVDF tails as a function of the radial distance from the sun. Basically, our study is incremental to the previous studies of the fast solar wind and primarily extends their conclusions on a large number of slow wind observations in the ecliptic plane. We confirm that the halo and the strahl relative densities vary in an opposite way. The relative number of strahl electrons is decreasing with radial distance, whereas the relative number of halo electrons is increasing. The fractional density of the core population remains roughly constant. These findings suggest that there are mechanisms in the solar wind that scatter the strahl electrons into the halo. Also, we find that the relative importance of the nonthermal electrons in the fast solar wind is slightly higher compared to the slow wind. Copyright 2009 by the American Geophysical Union.