Description
This book is a discourse on a question central to an understanding of the physics of plasmas in space — the acceleration of electrons in the Earth’s outer environment (the magnetosphere) and beyond, in the solar wind, at the sun and in the cosmos. The means by which some electrons acquire kinetic energies greatly exceeding those of their sources in the atmospheres of the Earth and the sun and other stars has been an intriguing mystery since the dawn of the space age some forty years ago. Evidence of acceleration appears all around us, in the dynamic displays of the aurora, in the existence of the Van Allen radiation belts and the solar wind, in solar flares and in the longest lived of all these puzzles — cosmic radiation. The book draws together and puts into perspective all of these problems beginning with the physical principles involved and descriptions of the various environments within which the acceleration takes place. Subsequent chapters explore acceleration at the terrestrial bow shock, at comet-Ike ion-injection events in the solar wind, at natural events in the near-Earth solar wind, at the terrestrial magnetopause, within the magnetosphere, at the sun and in cosmic space. This book will appeal to plasma physicists, astrophysicists, space physicists and atmospheric scientists at graduate level and above.
