Possible detection of magnetosheath jets in the environment of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko

As comets journey through the solar system, ices on the surface sublimate and the released neutral gas is ionized. Thus, the comet nucleus is surrounded by a cloud of heavy ions and electrons that interact with the solar wind. Their environment therefore is a unique laboratory to study plasma pick-up processes and multi-ion plasmas. In turn, remote observations of comets with imaging telescopes on ground and in space provide information about the solar wind properties at the comet. Comets are therefore laboratory and measurement at the same time. Studying the impact of solar wind structures like corotating interaction regions and interplanetary coronal mass ejections can therefore inform our knowledge of the processes in a collisional plasma. Active comets have a highly disturbed bow shock that can give rise to a number of cometosheath structures, one of which are magnetospheric jets: regions of enhanced dynamic pressure in the magnetosheath. They are usually associated to the region behind a quasi-parallel shock and have been well documented at Earth.

However, in recent years there have been efforts to identify these structures in other magnetosheaths as well. For example, recently it has been shown that they exist in the Martian magnetosheath. As the cometary plasma environment has very similar characteristics as the Martian one, it stands to reason that these structures also exist at Comets.

We present a study that uses Rosetta magnetic field, density and ion measurements to identify possible jet structures.

We find that they are ubiquitous especially in the plasma environment where Rosetta is probably in the cometosheath. Their occurrence matches what was found for similar events at Mars. The magnetic field can correlate or anti-correlate with the density enhancement, just like it is observed at Earth and Mars. Although velocity data is limited, at least some of the events show a velocity increase in the cometary ion population. This could be the first detection of a magnetosheath structure in the non-solar wind component of the plasma.