Engineering topics

Velli, Marco

Publications and source records attributed to Velli, Marco.

11 records

DOE OSTI2024

Magnetized Winds of M-type Stars and Star–Planet Magnetic Interactions: Uncertainties and Modeling Strategy

M-type stars are the most common stars in the Universe. They are ideal hosts for the search of exoplanets in the habitable zone (HZ), as their small size and low temperature make the HZ much closer-in than their solar twins. Harboring very deep convective layers, they also usually exhibit very intense magnetic fields. Understanding their environment, in particular their coronal and wind properties, is thus very important, as they might be very different from what is observed in the solar system. The mass-loss rate of M-type stars is poorly known observationally, and recent attempts to estimate it for some of them (e.g., TRAPPIST-1 and Proxima Centauri) can vary by an order of magnitude. In this work, we revisit the stellar wind properties of M dwarfs in the light of the latest estimates of $\dot{M}$ through Lyα absorption at the astropause and slingshot prominences. We outline a modeling strategy to estimate the mass-loss rate, radiative loss, and wind speed, with uncertainties, based on an Alfvén-wave-driven stellar wind model. We find that it is very likely that several TRAPPIST-1 planets lie within the Alfvén surface, which implies that these planets experience star–planet magnetic interactions (SPMIs). We also find that SPMIs between Proxima Cen b and its host star could be the reason for recently observed radio emissions.

M stars↗

DOE OSTI2019

Explosive Magnetotail Activity

Modes and manifestations of the explosive activity in the Earth’s magnetotail, as well as its onset mechanisms and key pre-onset conditions are reviewed. Two mechanisms for the generation of the pre-onset current sheet are discussed, namely magnetic flux addition to the tail lobes, or other high-latitude perturbations, and magnetic flux evacuation from the near-Earth tail associated with dayside reconnection. Reconnection onset may require stretching and thinning of the sheet down to electron scales. It may also start in thicker sheets in regions with a tailward gradient of the equatorial magnetic field B$_z$; in this case it begins as an ideal-MHD instability followed by the generation of bursty bulk flows and dipolarization fronts. Indeed, remote sensing and global MHD modeling show the formation of tail regions with increased B$_z$, prone to magnetic reconnection, ballooning/interchange and flapping instabilities. While interchange instability may also develop in such thicker sheets, it may grow more slowly compared to tearing and cause secondary reconnection locally in the dawn-dusk direction. Post-onset transients include bursty flows and dipolarization fronts, micro-instabilities of lower-hybrid-drift and whistler waves, as well as damped global flux tube oscillations in the near-Earth region. They convert the stretched tail magnetic field energy into bulk plasma acceleration and collisionless heating, excitation of a broad spectrum of plasma waves, and collisional dissipation in the ionosphere. Collisionless heating involves ion reflection from fronts, Fermi, betatron as well as other, non-adiabatic, mechanisms. Ionospheric manifestations of some of these magnetotail phenomena are discussed. Explosive plasma phenomena observed in the laboratory, the solar corona and solar wind are also discussed.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

NASA NTRS2018

Solar Physics from Unconventional Viewpoints

We explore new opportunities for solar physics that could be realized by future missions providing sustained observations from vantage points away from the Sun-Earth line (SEL). These include observation from the far side of the Sun, at high latitudes including over the solar poles, or from near-quadrature angles relative to the Earth (e.g., the Sun-Earth L4 & L5 Lagrange points). Such observations fill known holes in our scientific understanding of the three-dimensional time-evolving Sun and heliosphere, and have the potential to open new frontiers through discoveries enabled by novel viewpoints.

Gibson, Sarah E.↗

DOE OSTI2017

Fast Magnetic Reconnection: “Ideal” Tearing and the Hall Effect

One of the main questions in magnetic reconnection is the origin of triggering behavior with on/off properties that, once it is activated, accounts for the fast magnetic energy conversion to kinetic and thermal energies at the heart of explosive events in astrophysical and laboratory plasmas. Over the past decade, progress has been made on the initiation of fast reconnection via the plasmoid instability and what has been called “ideal” tearing, which sets in once current sheets thin to a critical inverse aspect ratio (a/L){sub c}. As shown by Pucci and Velli, at (a/L){sub c}∼S{sup −1/3}, the timescale for the instability to develop becomes of the order of the Alfvén time and independent of the Lundquist number (here defined in terms of current sheet length L). However, given the large values of S in natural plasmas, this transition might occur for thicknesses of the inner resistive singular layer that are comparable to the ion inertial length d {sub i}. When this occurs, Hall currents produce a three-dimensional quadrupole structure of the magnetic field, and the dispersive waves introduced by the Hall effect accelerate the instability. Here we present a linear study showing how the “ideal” tearing mode critical aspect ratio is modified when Hall effects are taken into account, including more general scaling laws of the growth rates in terms of sheet inverse aspect ratio: the critical inverse aspect ratio is amended to a/L≃(di/L){sup 0.29}(1/S){sup 0.19}, at which point the instability growth rate becomes Alfvénic and does not depend on either of the (small) parameters d{sub i}/L,1/S. We discuss the implications of this generalized triggering aspect ratio for recently developed phase diagrams of magnetic reconnection.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

DOE OSTI2017

Evolving Waves and Turbulence in the Outer Corona and Inner Heliosphere: The Accelerating Expanding Box

Alfvénic fluctuations in the solar wind display many properties reflecting an ongoing nonlinear cascade, e.g., a well-defined spectrum in frequency, together with some characteristics more commonly associated with the linear propagation of waves from the Sun, such as the variation of fluctuation amplitude with distance, dominated by solar wind expansion effects. Therefore, both nonlinearities and expansion must be included simultaneously in any successful model of solar wind turbulence evolution. Because of the disparate spatial scales involved, direct numerical simulations of turbulence in the solar wind represent an arduous task, especially if one wants to go beyond the incompressible approximation. Indeed, most simulations neglect solar wind expansion effects entirely. Here we develop a numerical model to simulate turbulent fluctuations from the outer corona to 1 au and beyond, including the sub-Alfvénic corona. The accelerating expanding box (AEB) extends the validity of previous expanding box models by taking into account both the acceleration of the solar wind and the inhomogeneity of background density and magnetic field. Our method incorporates a background accelerating wind within a magnetic field that naturally follows the Parker spiral evolution using a two-scale analysis in which the macroscopic spatial effect coupling fluctuations with background gradients becomes a time-dependent coupling term in a homogeneous box. In this paper we describe the AEB model in detail and discuss its main properties, illustrating its validity by studying Alfvén wave propagation across the Alfvén critical point.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

DOE OSTI2016

CLOSED-FIELD CORONAL HEATING DRIVEN BY WAVE TURBULENCE

To simulate the energy balance of coronal plasmas on macroscopic scales, we often require the specification of the coronal heating mechanism in some functional form. To go beyond empirical formulations and to build a more physically motivated heating function, we investigate the wave-turbulence-driven (WTD) phenomenology for the heating of closed coronal loops. Our implementation is designed to capture the large-scale propagation, reflection, and dissipation of wave turbulence along a loop. The parameter space of this model is explored by solving the coupled WTD and hydrodynamic evolution in 1D for an idealized loop. The relevance to a range of solar conditions is also established by computing solutions for over one hundred loops extracted from a realistic 3D coronal field. Due to the implicit dependence of the WTD heating model on loop geometry and plasma properties along the loop and at the footpoints, we find that this model can significantly reduce the number of free parameters when compared to traditional empirical heating models, and still robustly describe a broad range of quiet-Sun and active region conditions. The importance of the self-reflection term in producing relatively short heating scale heights and thermal nonequilibrium cycles is also discussed.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

DOE OSTI2016

INWARD MOTIONS IN THE OUTER SOLAR CORONA BETWEEN 7 AND 12 R {sub ⊙}: EVIDENCE FOR WAVES OR MAGNETIC RECONNECTION JETS?

DeForest et al. used synoptic visible-light image sequences from the COR2 coronagraph on board the STEREO-A spacecraft to identify inbound wave motions in the outer corona beyond 7 solar radii and inferred, from the observation, that the Alfvén surface separating the magnetically dominated corona from the flow dominated wind must be located beyond at least 12 solar radii from the Sun over polar coronal holes and beyond 15 solar radii in the streamer belt. Here, we attempt identification of the observed inward signal by theoretically reconstructing height-speed diagrams and comparing them to the observed profiles. Interpretation in terms of Alfvén waves or Alfvénic turbulence appears to be ruled out by the fact that the observed signal shows a deceleration of inward motion when approaching the Sun. Fast magnetoacoustic waves are not directly ruled out in this way, as it is possible for inward waves observed in quadrature, but not propagating exactly radially, to suffer total reflection as the Alfvén speed rises close to the Sun. However, the reconstructed signal in the height-speed diagram has the wrong concavity. A final possibility is decelerating reconnection jets, most probably from component reconnection, in the accelerating wind: the profile in this case appears to match the observations very well. This interpretation does not alter the conclusion that the Alfvén surface must be at least 12 solar radii from the photosphere. Further observations should help constrain this process, never identified previously in this way, in the distance range from 7 to 12 solar radii.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

DOE OSTI2014

Application of a solar wind model driven by turbulence dissipation to a 2D magnetic field configuration

Although it is widely accepted that photospheric motions provide the energy source and that the magnetic field must play a key role in the process, the detailed mechanisms responsible for heating the Sun's corona and accelerating the solar wind are still not fully understood. Cranmer et al. developed a sophisticated, one-dimensional (1D), time-steady model of the solar wind with turbulence dissipation. By varying the coronal magnetic field, they obtain, for a single choice of wave properties, a realistic range of slow and fast wind conditions with a sharp latitudinal transition between the two streams. Using a 1D, time-dependent model of the solar wind of Lionello et al., which incorporates turbulent dissipation of Alfvén waves to provide heating and acceleration of the plasma, we have explored a similar configuration, obtaining qualitatively equivalent results. However, our calculations suggest that the rapid transition between slow and fast wind suggested by this 1D model may be disrupted in multidimensional MHD simulations by the requirement of transverse force balance.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

NASA NTRS2011

Coronal Plumes in the Fast Solar Wind

The expansion of a coronal hole filled with a discrete number of higher density coronal plumes is simulated using a time-dependent two-dimensional code. A solar wind model including an exponential coronal heating function and a flux of Alfven waves propagating both inside and outside the structures is taken as a basic state. Different plasma plume profiles are obtained by using different scale heights for the heating rates. Remote sensing and solar wind in situ observations are used to constrain the parameter range of the study. Time dependence due to plume ignition and disappearance is also discussed. Velocity differences of the order of approximately 50 km/s, such as those found in microstreams in the high-speed solar wind, may be easily explained by slightly different heat deposition profiles in different plumes. Statistical pressure balance in the fast wind data may be masked by the large variety of body and surface waves which the higher density filaments may carry, so the absence of pressure balance in the microstreams should not rule out their interpretation as the extension of coronal plumes into interplanetary space. Mixing of plume-interplume material via the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability seems to be possible within the parameter ranges of the models defined here, only at large di stances from the Sun, beyond 0.2-0.3 AU. Plasma and composition measurements in the inner heliosphere, such as those which will become available with Solar Orbiter and Solar Probe Plus, should therefore definitely be able to identify plume remnants in the solar wind.

Velli, Marco↗

NASA NTRS2007

Alfven Waves and Turbulence in the Solar Atmosphere and Solar Wind

We solve the problem of propagation and dissipation of Alfvenic turbulence in a model solar atmosphere consisting of a static photosphere and chromosphere, transition region, and open corona and solar wind using a phenomenological model for the turbulent dissipation based on wave reflection. We show that most of the dissipation for a given wave frequency spectrum occurs in the lower corona, and the overall rms amplitude of the fluctuations evolves in a way consistent with observations. The frequency spectrum for a Kolmogorov-like slope is not found to change dramatically from the photosphere to the solar wind; however, it does preserve signatures of transmission throughout the lower atmospheric layers, namely, oscillations in the spectrum at high frequencies reminiscent of the resonances found in the linear case. These may disappear once more realistic couplings for the nonlinear terms are introduced or if time-dependent variability of the lower atmospheric layer is introduced.

turbulence↗

NASA NTRS1986

Resistive ballooning modes in line-tied coronal arcades

The equations describing the linear evolution of resistive ballooning modes are obtained by using a modified WKB expansion in the short perpendicular wavelength, while variations of the perturbations along the field are described by a slowly varying amplitude, on which the tying boundary conditions are imposed. In general, given an equilibrium, there are certain ranges of magnetic surfaces for which the system predicts instability even without dissipation. The main conclusion is that within the resistive MHD approximation cylindrically symmetric arcades with pressure falling with radius are unstable to resistive localized modes; the growth rates, close to ideal marginal stability, are large, so that it would appear that energy could be released during 10 to 100 Alfven times. The wavelength of the modes is expected to be limited by the ion gyroradius, when stabilizing drift effects must be taken into account. The nonlinear evolution of resistive ballooning modes should be studied to assess their overall relevance to the violent and rapidly evolving phenomena observed on the sun.

Velli, Marco↗