Langmuir waves and type III bursts observed by the wind spacecraft

Abstract

Interplanetary electron beams, produced by CMEs and flares, are unstable in the solar wind and generate Langmuir waves at the local plasma frequency or its harmonic. Radio observations of those waves in the range 4 kHz-256 kHz from the WAVES experiment onboard the WIND spacecraft have been statistically analyzed. A subset of 10 events has been selected for this study. The background consisting of thermal noise, type III bursts and Galactic background has been removed and the histogram of the remaining power spectral density has been fitted by Pearson's system of distributions. © 2010 American Institute of Physics.