Interstellar hydrogen fluxes measured by IBEX-Lo in 2009: numerical modeling and comparison with the data

TL;DR

This study models interstellar hydrogen fluxes measured by IBEX-Lo in 2009, revealing discrepancies with observations and emphasizing the significant role of solar radiation pressure in flux ratios.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed kinetic model accounting for solar and heliospheric variations and compares it with IBEX data, highlighting the importance of solar radiation pressure.

Findings

Model predicts higher flux in energy bin 2 than bin 1, opposite to observations.

Best fit parameters: solar radiation pressure ratio μ₀ ≈ 1.26 and ionization rate ~3.7×10⁻⁷ s⁻¹.

Discrepancy between modeled μ₀ and that derived from solar Lyman-alpha flux data.

Abstract

In this paper, we perform numerical modeling of the interstellar hydrogen fluxes measured by IBEX-Lo during orbit 23 (spring 2009) using a state-of-the-art kinetic model of the interstellar neutral hydrogen distribution in the heliosphere. This model takes into account the temporal and heliolatitudinal variations of the solar parameters as well as non-Maxwellian kinetic properties of the hydrogen distribution due to charge exchange in the heliospheric interface. We found that there is a qualitative difference between the IBEX-Lo data and the modeling results obtained with the three-dimensional, time-dependent model. Namely, the model predicts a larger count rate in energy bin~2 (20-41 eV) than in energy bin~1 (11-21 eV), while the data shows the opposite case. We perform study of the model parameter effects on the IBEX-Lo fluxes and the ratio of fluxes in two energy channels. We shown that the most important parameter, which has a major influence on the ratio of the fluxes in the two energy bins, is the solar radiation pressure. The parameter fitting procedure shows that the best agreement between the model result and the data occurs in the case when the ratio of the solar radiation pressure to the solar gravitation, $\mu_0$, is 1.26$^{+0.06}_{-0.076}$, and the total ionization rate of hydrogen at 1 AU is $\beta_{E,0}=3.7^{+0.39}_{-0.35}\times 10^{-7}$~s$^{-1}$. We have found that the value of $\mu_0$ is much larger than $\mu_0=0.89$, which is the value derived from the integrated solar Lyman-alpha flux data for the period of time studied. We discuss possible reasons for the differences.