Shocks Beyond the Heliopause

Voyager 1 and 2 (V1 and V2) crossed the heliospheric termination shock in December 2004 and in August 2007, respectively. While V2 is still in the inner heliosheath between the termination shock and the heliopause, a tangential discontinuity separatingthe solar wind (SW) from the local interstellar medium (LISM), V1 penetrated into the LISM in 2012 and is now sampling its properties. Since the plasma instrument onboard V1 is not operational, the Plasma Wave instrument (PWS) played a decisive role in the determination of the spacecraft crossing the heliopause and entering the LISM. Using time-dependent, data-driven boundary conditions and theoretical criteria for wave generation, we investigate the effect of shock propagation through the LISM on the generation of 2-3 kHz radio emission and, by comparing simulations with the V1 PWS and magnetometer observations derive information about the LISM plasma properties in the vicinity of the heliopause. This is done with our in-house Multi-Scale Fluid-Kinetic Simulation Suite, which solves the coupled MHD equations for plasma and Euler or Boltzmann equations for neutral atoms. A flexible adaptive mesh refinement approach allows us to increase the space resolution near the heliopause and resolve the global properties of propagating shocks.The boundary conditions are specified at 1 AU using OMNI data and a special time and space interpolation procedures that allow us to generate time-dependent, 3D distributions of plasma and magnetic field quantities. In addition we explore the effect of pickup ions of the heliospheric interface and on the heliocentric distance to the heliopause.