Turbulence in the solar wind: spectra from Voyager 2 data at 5 AU

TL;DR

This paper analyzes Voyager 2 data at 5 AU to study solar wind turbulence spectra, revealing power-law scaling and intermittency, with implications for understanding solar wind origin and evolution.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed spectral analysis of solar wind turbulence at 5 AU using Voyager 2 data, addressing challenges from incomplete data and estimating spectral slopes.

Findings

Spectral exponents range from -2.1 to -1.1 across frequency ranges.

Solar wind turbulence exhibits significant intermittency.

Power-law scaling is observed in velocity and magnetic field fluctuations.

Abstract

Fluctuations in the flow velocity and magnetic fields are ubiquitous in the Solar System. These fluctuations are turbulent, in the sense that they are disordered and span a broad range of scales in both space and time. The study of solar wind turbulence is motivated by a number of factors all keys to the understanding of the Solar Wind origin and thermodynamics. The solar wind spectral properties are far from uniformity and evolve with the increasing distance from the sun. Most of the available spectra of solar wind turbulence were computed at 1 astronomical unit, while accurate spectra on wide frequency ranges at larger distances are still few. In this paper we consider solar wind spectra derived from the data recorded by the Voyager 2 mission during 1979 at about 5 AU from the sun. Voyager 2 data are an incomplete time series with a voids/signal ratio that typically increases as the spacecraft moves away from the sun (45% missing data in 1979), making the analysis challenging. In order to estimate the uncertainty of the spectral slopes, different methods are tested on synthetic turbulence signals with the same gap distribution as V2 data. Spectra of all variables show a power law scaling with exponents between -2.1 and -1.1, depending on frequency subranges. Probability density functions (PDFs) and correlations indicate that the flow has a significant intermittency.