The helium Warm Breeze in IBEX observations as a result of charge exchange collisions in the outer heliosheath

TL;DR

This study models the IBEX observations of neutral helium atoms, demonstrating that the Warm Breeze results from charge exchange collisions in the outer heliosheath and is influenced by the interstellar magnetic field.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed simulation linking the Warm Breeze to charge exchange processes and heliospheric magnetic field effects, confirming its origin as a secondary helium population.

Findings

Warm Breeze arises from charge exchange in the outer heliosheath.

The signal is sensitive to heliosphere distortions caused by magnetic fields.

Simulations agree qualitatively with IBEX data using realistic plasma flow models.

Abstract

We simulated the signal due to neutral He atoms, observed by Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX), assuming that charge exchange collisions between neutral He atoms and He+ ions operate everywhere between the heliopause and a distant source region in the local interstellar cloud, where the neutral and charged components are in thermal equilibrium. We simulated several test cases of the plasma flow within the outer heliosheath and investigated the signal generation for plasma flows both in the absence and in the presence of the interstellar magnetic field. We found that a signal in the portion of IBEX data identified as due to the Warm Breeze does not arise when a homogeneous plasma flow in front of the heliopause is assumed, but it appears immediately when any reasonable disturbance in its flow due to the presence of the heliosphere is assumed. We obtained a good qualitative agreement between the data selected for comparison and the simulations for a model flow with the velocity vector of the unperturbed gas and the direction and intensity of magnetic field adopted from recent determinations. We conclude that direct-sampling observations of neutral He atoms at 1~AU from the Sun are a sensitive tool for investigating the flow of interstellar matter in the outer heliosheath, that the Warm Breeze is indeed the secondary population of interstellar helium, as it was hypothesized earlier, and that the WB signal is consistent with the heliosphere distorted from axial symmetry by the interstellar magnetic field.