Building a Weakly Outgassing Comet from a Generalized Ohm’s Law

Jan Deca, Pierre Henri, Andrey Divin, Anders Eriksson, Marina Galand, Arnaud Beth, Katharina Ostaszewski, and Mihály Horányi
Phys. Rev. Lett. 123, 055101 – Published 1 August 2019

Abstract

When a weakly outgassing comet is sufficiently close to the Sun, the formation of an ionized coma results in solar wind mass loading and magnetic field draping around its nucleus. Using a 3D fully kinetic approach, we distill the components of a generalized Ohm’s law and the effective electron equation of state directly from the self-consistently simulated electron dynamics and identify the driving physics in the various regions of the cometary plasma environment. Using the example of space plasmas, in particular multispecies cometary plasmas, we show how the description for the complex kinetic electron dynamics can be simplified through a simple effective closure, and identify where an isotropic single-electron fluid Ohm’s law approximation can be used, and where it fails.

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  • Received 8 January 2019
  • Revised 21 May 2019

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.123.055101

© 2019 American Physical Society

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Plasma PhysicsGravitation, Cosmology & Astrophysics

Authors & Affiliations

Jan Deca*

  • Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP), University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, Colorado 80303, USA and Institute for Modeling Plasma, Atmospheres and Cosmic Dust, NASA/SSERVI, Moffet Field, California 94035, USA

Pierre Henri

  • LPC2E, CNRS, Orléans 45071, France
  • Laboratoire Lagrange, CNRS, Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur, Université Côte d’Azur, Nice, France

Andrey Divin

  • Physics Department, St. Petersburg State University, St. Petersburg 198504, Russia

Anders Eriksson

  • Swedish Institute of Space Physics (IRF), Uppsala 751 21, Sweden

Marina Galand and Arnaud Beth

  • Department of Physics, Imperial College London, London SW7 2AZ, United Kingdom

Katharina Ostaszewski

  • Institute for Geophysics and Extraterrestrial Physics (IGeP), Technische Universtität Braunschweig, Braunschweig 38106, Germany

Mihály Horányi

  • Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP), University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, Colorado 80303, USA, Institute for Modeling Plasma, Atmospheres and Cosmic Dust, NASA/SSERVI, Moffet Field, California 94035, USA, and Department of Physics, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, Colorado 80309, USA

  • *jandeca@gmail.com

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Issue

Vol. 123, Iss. 5 — 2 August 2019

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