Dissemin is shutting down on January 1st, 2025

Published in

American Geophysical Union, Geophysical Research Letters, 10(50), 2023

DOI: 10.1029/2022gl102574

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MESSENGER Observations of Standing Whistler Waves Upstream of Mercury's Bow Shock

This paper was not found in any repository, but could be made available legally by the author.
This paper was not found in any repository, but could be made available legally by the author.

Full text: Unavailable

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Preprint: archiving allowed
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Postprint: archiving allowed
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Published version: archiving restricted
Data provided by SHERPA/RoMEO

Abstract

AbstractThis paper reports on the standing whistler waves upstream of Mercury's quasi‐perpendicular bow shock. Using MESSENGER's magnetometer data, 36 wave events were identified during interplanetary coronal mass ejections (ICMEs). These elliptic or circular polarized waves were characterized by: (a) a constant phase with respect to the shock, (b) propagation along the normal direction to the shock surface, and (c) rapid damping over a few wave periods. We inferred the speed of Mercury's bow shock as ∼26 km/s and a shock width of 1.87 ion inertial length. These events were observed in 20% of the MESSENGER orbits during ICMEs. We conclude that standing whistler wave generations at Mercury are generic to ICME impacts and the low Alfvén Mach number (MA) collisionless shock, and are not affected by the absolute dimensions of the bow shock. Our results further support the theory that these waves are generated by the current in the shock.