Radio-quiet Fast Coronal Mass Ejections

Coronal mass ejections (CMEs) drive shocks in the interplanetary medium that produce type II radio emission. These CMEs are faster and wider on the average, than the general population of CMEs. However, when we start from fast (speed > 900 km/s) and wide (angular width > 60 degrees), more than half of them are not associated with radio bursts. In order to understand why these CMEs are radio quiet, we collected all the fast and wide (FW) CMEs detected by the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) mission's Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph (LASCO) and isolated those without associated type II radio bursts. The radio bursts were identified in the dynamic spectra of the Radio and Plasma Wave (WAVES) Experiment on board the Wind spacecraft. We also checked the list against metric type II radio bursts reported in Solar Geophysical Data and isolated those without any radio emission. This exercise resulted in about 140 radio-quiet FW CMEs. We identified the source regions of these CMEs using the Solar Geophysical Data listings, cross-checked against the eruption regions in the SOHO/EIT movies. We explored a number of possibilities for the radio-quietness: (i) Source region being too far behind the limb, (ii) flare size, (iii) brightness of the CME, and (iv) the density of the ambient medium. We suggest that a combination of CME energy and the Alfven speed profile of the ambient medium is primarily responsible for the radio-quietness of these FW CMEs.