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Abstract. Magnetic holes (MHs) are depressions of the magnetic field magnitude. Turner et al. (1977) identified the first MHs in the solar wind and determined an occurrence rate of 1.5 MHs/d. Winterhalter et al. (1994) developed an automatic identification criterion to search for MHs in Ulysses data in the solar wind between 1 AU and 5.4 AU. We adopt their criterion to expand the search to the heliocentric distances down to 0.3 AU using data from Helios 1 and 2 and up to 17 AU using data from Voyager 2. We relate our observations to two theoretical approaches which describe the so-called linear MHs in which the magnetic vector varies in magnitude rather than direction. Therefore we focus on such linear MHs with a directional change less than 10º. With our observations of about 850 MHs we present the following results: Approximately 30% of all the identified MHs are linear. The maximum angle between the initial magnetic field vector and any vector inside the MH is 20º in average and shows a weak relation to the depth of the MHs. The angle between the initial magnetic field and the minimum variance direction of those structures is large and very probably close to 90º. The MHs are placed in a high β environment even though the average solar wind shows a smaller β. The widths decrease from about 50 proton inertial length in a region between 0.3 AU and 0.4 AU heliocentric distance to about 15 proton inertial length at distances larger than 10 AU. This quantity is correlated with the β of the MH environments with respect to the heliocentric distance. There is a clear preference for the occurrence of depressions instead of compressions. We discuss these results with regard to the main theories of MHs, the mirror instability and the alternative soliton approach. Although our observational results are more consistent with the soliton theory we favour a combination of both. MHs might be the remnants of initial mirror mode structures which can be described as solitons during the main part of their lifetime.

The interaction of the solar wind with cometary plasma is studied in the framework of a collisionless 2D bi‐ion fluid plasma model which allows for different bulk velocities of the light and heavy ions. It is shown that an ion composition boundary is formed which is impenetrable for the protons but presents no barrier to the magnetic field flux. The magnetic field is transported further downstream by the charge‐neutralizing electrons which follow the heavy ions through the boundary. We believe that this new type of plasma boundary can explain the observed ion composition boundary at comets (cometopause, pile‐up boundary), at Mars (planetopause, massloading boundary) and at Venus (rarefaction wave, intermediate transition).

[1] One-dimensional hybrid code simulations are presented which show that magnetic field depletions of variable length and depht can be maintained over long time in mirror-stable high-b plasmas under certain conditions while magnetic compressions cannot. This suggests that short-scale magnetic holes (MHs), frequently observed in space plasmas, may be a feature of an essentially isotropic rather than a mirror-unstable plasma. This suggestion is supported by additional simulations in anisotropic plasmas which reveal that localized magnetic depressions are not a typical feature of saturated states of the mirror instability.

The Martian environment is characterized by the presence of heavy (oxygen) ions of planetary origin which strongly influence the solar wind dynamics, including the bow shock structure and position and may cause additional plasma boundaries in the magnetosheath. In this paper the dispersion characteristics of low-frequency electromagnetic waves (LFEW) in the proton gyrofrequency range are studied. The excitation of these waves results from the relative motion between the solar wind protons and planetary heavy ions, which are considered as unmagnetized and, therefore, may act like a beam in the solar wind. The model takes into account the small extension of the Martian magnetosphere compared with the pickup gyroradius of an exospheric ion. From the dispersion analysis it was found that the most unstable waves with relatively high growth rates propagate oblique to the ambient magnetic field. For small propagation angle to the magnetic field these are right-hand polarized whistler waves in the solar wind frame, and due to Doppler shift they appear near to the proton cyclotron frequency as left-hand polarized waves in the beam (spacecraft) frame. We suggest that the sporadic LFEW emission as seen in the upstream region of Mars by Phobos-2 may indicate the existence of localized "heavy ion bunches" whose origin is relatively unclear, but a possible relation to the Martian moons cannot be excluded. Especially, the socalled Phobos events marked by spectral peaks around the proton cyclotron frequency may be interpreted as signatures of the solar wind interaction with a tenuous gas torus. A comparable situation is known from the AMPTE Ba and Li releases where during the late stages of the experiments an enhanced proton cyclotron emission was observed as well. Another important aspect of LFEW excitation is its role in proton deceleration and heating upstream the bow shock where turbulent processes may provide a strong momentum coupling between the solar wind and the newly generated ions of planetary origin.

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