Topological Features of a Compressible Plasma Vortex Sheet: 6 Cases

  • Released Friday, December 17, 1993
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The Voyager and Pioneer Spacecraft have detected large-scale quasi-periodic plasma fluctuations in the outer heliosphere beyond 20 AU. A plasma vortex sheet model can explain these fluctuations and the observed correlations between various physical variables. The large scale outer heliosphere is modeled by solving the 3-D compressible magnetohydrodynamic equations involving three interacting shear layers.

Computations were done on a Cray computer at the NASA Center for Computational Sciences.

Six cases are animated: Weak magnetic field and strong magnetic field, each at three values of tau, the vortex street characteristic time. Contours of density are shown as dark transparent 'tubes'. Critical points of the velocity field are represented by 'Glyphs'. Vortex cores are shown in orange and blue.

An animation of a vortex street with a weak magnetic field and a tau of 20

An animation of a vortex street with a weak magnetic field and a tau of 40

An animation of a vortex street with a weak magnetic field and a tau of 60

An animation of a vortex street with a strong magnetic field and a tau of 20

An animation of a vortex street with a strong magnetic field and a tau of 80

An animation of a vortex street with a strong magnetic field and a tau of 80

Credits

Please give credit for this item to:
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio

This page was originally published on Friday, December 17, 1993.
This page was last updated on Wednesday, May 3, 2023 at 2:00 PM EDT.

Series

This visualization can be found in the following series:

Papers used in this visualization

Siregar, E., D. A. Roberts, and M. L. Goldstein, Quasi-periodic transverse plasma flow associated with an evolving MHD vortex street in the outer heliosphere, J. Geophys. Res., 98, 13, 233, 1993.