Abstract
Plasmas in Earth’s outer magnetosphere, magnetosheath, and solar wind
are essentially collisionless. This means particle distributions are not
typically in thermodynamic equilibrium and deviate significantly from
Maxwellian distributions. The deviations of these distributions can be
further enhanced by plasma processes, such as shocks, turbulence, and
magnetic reconnection. Such distributions can be unstable to a wide
variety of kinetic plasma instabilities, which in turn modify the
electron distributions. In this paper the deviations of the observed
electron distributions from a bi-Maxwellian distribution function is
calculated and quantified using data from the Magnetospheric Multiscale
(MMS) spacecraft. A statistical study from tens of millions of electron
distributions shows that the primary source of the observed
non-Maxwellianity are electron distributions consisting of distinct hot
and cold components in Earth’s low-density magnetosphere. This results
in large non-Maxwellianities in at low densities. However, after
performing a stastical study we find regions where large
non-Maxwellianities are observed for a given density. Highly
non-Maxwellian distributions are routinely found are Earth’s bowshock,
in Earth’s outer magnetosphere, and in the electron diffusion regions of
magnetic reconnection. Enhanced non-Maxwellianities are observed in the
turbulent magnetosheath, but are intermittent and are not correlated
with local processes. The causes of enhanced non-Maxwellianities are
investigated.