Red-Line (630nm) Pulsating Auroras And Their Possible Magnetospheric Driver

Abstract:

Pulsating auroras are usually known to be led by the precipitation of energetic electrons from the central plasma sheet, and are thus often displayed in blue-line and/or green-line auroral emission lines. In this study we report the observations of 630nm oxygen red-line auroras by REGO imager, and explore their possible underlying mechanisms. Upon inspecting the temporal/spatial pattern of the red-line pulsating auroras and comparing with concurrent/collocated observations from THEMIS and RAINBOW imagers, we distinguish two types of red-line pulsating auroras. In one type of red-line pulsating aurora, the emission is weak in intensity, but its pulsation is synchronous with that of the collocated green-line pulsating aurora. The other type of red-line pulsating aurora is fairly strong in intensity, but its temporal pattern contains much longer-period components as compared to the green-line pulsating aurora. In both types of pulsating auroras, the spatial dimension and motion speed of the red- and green-line auroral patches are rather comparable. We suggest that the first type of red-line pulsating aurora is caused by secondary electrons and/or a cascading excitation of O(1D) as the byproduct of the primary electron precipitation (and the resulting green-line emission), while the second type of red-line pulsating aurora is directly led by the low-energy part (hundreds of eV) of the electron precipitation in the lower F-region ionosphere. In the latter regard, we present in-situ RBSP observations conjugate to the pulsating auroral patches in a few events, and explore a potential relationship between the red-line pulsating aurora and the electron cyclotron harmonic (ECH) wave, which is capable of scattering the low-energy electrons into the loss-cone in the inner magnetosphere.