Dust in and Around the Heliosphere and Astrospheres

Abstract

Interstellar dust particles were discovered in situ, in the solar system, with the Ulysses mission’s dust detector in 1992. Ever since, more interstellar dust particles have been measured inside the solar system by various missions, providing insight into not only the composition of such far-away visitors, but also in their dynamics and interaction with the heliosphere. The dynamics of interstellar (and interplanetary) dust in the solar/stellar systems depend on the dust properties and also on the space environment, in particular on the heliospheric/astrospheric plasma, and the embedded time-variable magnetic fields, via Lorentz forces. Also, solar radiation pressure filters out dust particles depending on their composition. Charge exchanges between the dust and the ambient plasma occur, and pick-up ions can be created. The role of the dust for the physics of the heliosphere and astrospheres is fairly unexplored, but an important and a rapidly growing topic of investigation. This review paper gives an overview of dust processes in heliospheric and astrospheric environments, with its resulting dynamics and consequences. It discusses theoretical modeling, and reviews in situ measurements and remote sensing of dust in and near our heliosphere and astrospheres, with the latter being a newly emerging field of science. Finally, it summarizes the open questions in the field.

A future interstellar probe on the dynamic heliosphere and its interaction with the very local interstellar medium: In-situ particle and fields measurements and remotely sensed ENAs

“…Following the ISP study report (https://interstellarprobe.jhuapl.edu/ Interstellar-Probe-MCR.pdf; McNutt et al, 2022;Brandt et al, 2022b), a pragmatic mission concept (launch window starts in 2036), traveling well beyond the heliopause, and in anticipation of the IMAP mission (McComas et al, 2018) at ∼1 AU (launch in 2025) acting as a high-res "guide" to ISP, this paper highlighted the importance of studying the physics of the interactions pertaining to the expanding solar wind that meets the plasma, gas and dust flows of the VLISM, forming the complex and vast region of our astrosphere (see also Brandt et al, 2022a;Dialynas et al, 2022a;DeMajistre et al, 2022;Hill et al, 2022;Lavraud et al, 2022;Mostafavi et al, 2022;Opher et al, 2022;Provornikova et al, 2022;Sokół et al, 2022;Sterken et al, 2022). We focused on three fundamental open science questions that can only be addressed by exploiting a combination of in-situ charged particle, plasma waves and fields measurements with remotely sensed ENAs, that are measured simultaneously on the future ISP mission.…”