Observation of Solar Wind Charge Exchange Emission from Exospheric Material in and Outside Earth's Magnetosheath 2008 September 25
Lepri, S. T.; Kuntz, K. D.; Snowden, S. L.; Collier, M. R.; Robertson, I.; Cravens, T.; Tomas, L.
United States, Spain
Abstract
A long XMM-Newton exposure is used to observe solar wind charge exchange (SWCX) emission from exospheric material in and outside Earth's magnetosheath. The light curve of the O VII (0.5-0.62 keV) band is compared with a model for the expected emission, and while the emission is faint and the light curve has considerable scatter, the correlation is significant to better than 99.9%. This result demonstrates the validity of the geocoronal SWCX emission model for predicting a contribution to astrophysical observations to a scale factor of order unity (1.5). In addition, an average value of the SWCX O VII emission from the magnetosheath over the observation of 2.6 ± 0.5 LU is derived. The results also demonstrate the potential utility of using X-ray observations to study global phenomena of the magnetosheath which currently are only investigated using in situ measurements.