Empirical modeling of a CME constrained to ion distributions detected by ACE/SWICS

Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) are large scale eruptions that propel massive amounts of solar material into the interplanetary medium. It is generally accepted that CMEs undergo heating as they are released from the Sun, however, the mechanism itself remains largely unknown. This work aims to quantify the heating of a CME event, to compare with proposed heating sources, using in-situ ions as tracers to the thermal history of the plasma. The ions are a powerful diagnostic due to the frozen-in process which renders the ionization level of the expanding plasma fixed as it reaches an altitude where the ionization and recombination processes stop due to a rapid decrease in density. The frozen-in ions detected near the Earth retain information of the local thermodynamic environment at their freeze-in altitude, providing a manner of probing plasma properties near the Sun. Using the Michigan Ionization Code (MIC), we empirically determined the thermodynamic evolution of Earth bound ejecta constrained to in-situ ion distributions from Carbon, Oxygen and Iron of the January 9th 2005 Interplanetary CME (ICME) detected by ACE/SWICS. Final results show that the distributions are made up of four distinct plasma structures that resemble plasma originating from the main prominence core and surrounding prominence coronal transition region (PCTR) of the CME, as well as, a warmer plasma structure possibly originating from the nearby corona. The electron density, temperature and velocity derived from our modeling results are used to compute a heating rate that we compare to the energy deposition from wave heating computed using a magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) CME simulation.