Adiabatic energy change in the inner heliosheath: How does it affect the distribution of pickup protons and energetic neutral atom fluxes?

TL;DR

This paper investigates how adiabatic energy changes in the inner heliosheath influence the distribution of pickup protons and energetic neutral atom fluxes, revealing their significant impact on observed ENA fluxes and distributions.

Contribution

It highlights the importance of including adiabatic energy changes in models of the heliosphere, which are often neglected or misrepresented, to better match observational data.

Findings

Adiabatic energy change broadens pickup proton velocity distribution.

Significant ENA flux enhancement up to 20 times in downwind directions.

Improves agreement between simulations and ENA observations.

Abstract

The hydrogen atoms penetrate the heliosphere from the local interstellar medium, and while being ionized, they form the population of pickup protons. The distribution of pickup protons is modified by the adiabatic heating (cooling) induced by the solar wind plasma compression (expansion). In this study, we emphasize the importance of the adiabatic energy change in the inner heliosheath that is usually either neglected or considered improperly. The effect of this process on the energy and spatial distributions of pickup protons and energetic neutral atoms (ENAs), which originate in the charge exchange of pickup protons, has been investigated and quantified using a kinetic model. The model employs the global distributions of plasma and hydrogen atoms in the heliosphere from the simulations of a kinetic-magnetohydrodynamic model of solar wind interaction with the local interstellar medium. The findings indicate that the adiabatic energy change is responsible for the broadening of the pickup proton velocity distribution and the significant enhancement of ENA fluxes (up to $\sim$5 and $\sim$20 times in the upwind and downwind directions at energies $\sim$1-2 keV for an observer at 1 au). It sheds light on the role of adiabatic energy change in explaining the discrepancies between the ENA flux observations and the results of numerical simulations.