16 years of Ulysses Interstellar Dust Measurements in the Solar System: II. Fluctuations in the Dust Flow from the Data

TL;DR

This study analyzes 16 years of Ulysses spacecraft data to investigate interstellar dust flow fluctuations, revealing solar magnetic cycle effects, a significant directional shift, and flux variations, contributing to understanding dust dynamics in the Solar System.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive, time-resolved analysis of interstellar dust flow parameters from Ulysses data, highlighting solar cycle influences and unexpected flux changes.

Findings

Flow direction shifted by 50° in 2005

Flux increased by a factor of 4 within 8 months

Flow parameters vary with solar magnetic cycle

Abstract

The Ulysses spacecraft provided the first opportunity to identify and study Interstellar Dust (ISD) in-situ in the Solar System between 1992 and 2007. Here we present the first comprehensive analysis of the ISD component in the entire Ulysses dust data set. We analysed several parameters of the ISD flow in a time-resolved fashion: flux, flow direction, mass index, and flow width. The general picture is in agreement with a time-dependent focussing/defocussing of the charged dust particles due to long-term variations of the solar magnetic field throughout a solar magnetic cycle of 22 years. In addition, we confirm a shift in dust direction of $50^{\circ} \pm 7^{\circ}$ in 2005, along with a steep, size-dependent increase in flux by a factor of 4 within 8 months. To date, this is difficult to interpret and has to be examined in more detail by new dynamical simulations. This work is part of a series of three papers. This paper concentrates on the time-dependent flux and direction of the ISD. In a companion paper (Kr\"uger et al., 2015) we analyse the overall mass distribution of the ISD measured by Ulysses, and a third paper discusses the results of modelling the flow of the ISD as seen by Ulysses (Sterken et al., 2015).