Princeton Center for Heliophysics Seminar

The WIND satellite has been collecting magnetic fields at 92-ms and plasma moments at 3-s cadence in the pristine solar wind over nearly two full solar cycles, since it was launched on 1 Nov 1994. We report on the statistical properties in and around magnetic reconnection jets in the solar wind during a nearly 10-year period of continuous observations from 1 July 2004 to 31 Dec 2014. The conservative criteria of the external variability of the magnetic field and plasma velocity that we applied in the automatic surveys for jets across current sheets of variable durations resulted in a total of 4451 candidate exhaust events over this period. We have analyzed the Walen relation manually across all candidate events, and this exercise resulted in a subset of 3374 confirmed reconnection exhausts. This particular WIND data survey applied six running windows with time durations Δt=[12-s, 18-s, 2-m, 4-m, 10-m, 20-m] to the solar wind observations of magnetic field and bulk velocity. We present and discuss the histograms of several important parameters associated with these periods of current sheets with reconnection exhausts. We will also discuss some initial comparisons with the intensity of solar wind turbulence inside the exhausts and how this compares with the intensity of the external solar wind turbulence ahead of the current sheets.