Electron Acceleration at Earth Bow Shock
Abstract: Electrons accelerating in shock events occur oftenin outer space, for example in supernovas and the poles of blackholes, and are of high interest to physicists and other researchers.The technology to take a closer look at events that far awaydoes not exist yet, but luckily we can observe similar events inplaces where the Earth’s magnetic fields and particle streamsfrom the Sun meet. Using data from NASA’s MMS mission thispaper aims to gather information about what variables affect theacceleration, under what conditions the most energetic eventsoccur and create a ranked list of several hundreds of theseevents. It did this by calculating the expected value of the electrondistribution function at different times to create a dimensionlessranking. The study showed that these events are highly complexand that it is difficult to assign a few variables which would affectthe acceleration. However it also showed that most accelerationoccurs after the most abrupt shock crossing and not exactly atthe location where the expected value is maximal, and that thereare some correlations with angle relative to the solar magneticfield and electron number density.
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