C. Mazelle

A review of field‐aligned beams observed upstream of the bow shock

For more than two decades the Earth’s bow shock and traveling interplanetary shocks have attracted much attention as researchers have attempted to understand the collisionless mechanisms that thermalize transmitted particles and accelerate those that are observed propagating away from the shock into the upstream. We are concerned here with the class of particles emerging from the shock that are field‐aligned and have energies of a few to several keV, and base our results on observations primarily from the Earth’s foreshock. While the basic empirical picture has been known for some time, fundamental questions about the underlying mechanisms producing them have resisted a comprehensive explanation. This review talk will begin with an overview of the observational framework, along with selected new results. The latter include recent refinements in the characterizations of upstream field‐aligned beams as a function of the shock geometry parameter θBn. Other observations from the Cluster spacecraft have shown ...

Theory for planetary exospheres: II. Radiation pressure effect on exospheric density profiles

Abstract The planetary exospheres are poorly known in their outer parts, since the neutral densities are low compared with the instruments detection capabilities. The exospheric models are thus often the main source of information at such high altitudes. We present a new way to take into account analytically the additional effect of the radiation pressure on planetary exospheres. In a series of papers, we present with an Hamiltonian approach the effect of the radiation pressure on dynamical trajectories, density profiles and escaping thermal flux. Our work is a generalization of the study by Bishop and Chamberlain (1989) . In this second part of our work, we present here the density profiles of atomic Hydrogen in planetary exospheres subject to the radiation pressure. We first provide the altitude profiles of ballistic particles (the dominant exospheric population in most cases), which exhibit strong asymmetries that explain the known geotail phenomenon at Earth. The radiation pressure strongly enhances the densities compared with the pure gravity case (i.e. the Chamberlain profiles), in particular at noon and midnight. We finally show the existence of an exopause that appears naturally as the external limit for bounded particles, above which all particles are escaping.

Theory for planetary exospheres: I. Radiation pressure effect on dynamical trajectories

Abstract The planetary exospheres are poorly known in their outer parts, since the neutral densities are low compared with the instruments detection capabilities. The exospheric models are thus often the main source of information at such high altitudes. We present a new way to take into account analytically the additional effect of the radiation pressure on planetary exospheres. In a series of papers, we present with an Hamiltonian approach the effect of the radiation pressure on dynamical trajectories, density profiles and escaping thermal flux. Our work is a generalisation of the study by Bishop and Chamberlain (Bishop, J., Chamberlian, J.W. [1989]. Icarus 81, 145–163). In this first paper, we present the complete solutions of particles trajectories, which are not conics, under the influence of the solar radiation pressure with some assumptions. This problem is similar to the classical Stark problem (Stark, J. [1914]. Ann. Phys. 348, 965–982). This problem was largely tackled in the literature and more specifically, recently by Lantoine and Russell (Lantoine, G., Russell, R.P. [2011]. Celest. Mech. Dynam. Astron. 109, 333–366) and by Biscani and Izzo (Biscani, F., Izzo, D. [2014]. Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 439, 810–822) as we will discuss in this paper. We give here the full set of solutions for the motion of a particle (in our case for an atom or a molecule), i.e. the space coordinates and the time solution for bounded and unbounded trajectories in terms of Jacobi elliptic functions. We thus provide here the complete set of solutions for this so-call Stark effect (Stark, J. [1914]. Ann. Phys. 348, 965–982) in terms of Jacobi elliptic functions (Jacobi, C.G.J. [1829]. Fundamenta nova theoriae functionum ellipticarum. Sumtibus fratrum), which may be used to model the trajectories of particles in planetary exospheres.

Theory for planetary exospheres: III. Radiation pressure effect on the Circular Restricted Three Body Problem and its implication on planetary atmospheres

Abstract The planetary exospheres are poorly known in their outer parts, since the neutral densities are low compared with the instruments detection capabilities. The exospheric models are thus often the main source of information at such high altitudes. We present a new way to take into account analytically the additional effect of the stellar radiation pressure on planetary exospheres. In a series of papers, we present with a Hamiltonian approach the effect of the radiation pressure on dynamical trajectories, density profiles and escaping thermal flux. Our work is a generalization of the study by Bishop and Chamberlain [1989] Icarus, 81, 145–163. In this third paper, we investigate the effect of the stellar radiation pressure on the Circular Restricted Three Body Problem (CR3BP), called also the photogravitational CR3BP, and its implication on the escape and the stability of planetary exospheres, especially for hot Jupiters. In particular, we describe the transformation of the equipotentials and the location of the Lagrange points, and we provide a modified equation for the Hill sphere radius that includes the influence of the radiation pressure. Finally, an application to the hot Jupiter HD 209458b and hot Neptune GJ 436b reveals the existence of a blow-off escape regime induced by the stellar radiation pressure.