Electron Exciter Speeds Associated with Interplanetary Type III Solar Radio Bursts

This article provides a comprehensive quantitative investigation of the kinematics of the electron exciters associated with interplanetary type III solar radio bursts. Detailed multispacecraft analyses of the radio and plasma wave data from the widely separated Wind and STEREO spacecraft are provided for five interplanetary type III bursts that illustrate different aspects of the problems involved in establishing the electron exciter speeds. The exciter kinematics are determined from the observed frequency drift and in-situ radiation characteristics for each type III burst. The analysis assumes propagation of the electron exciters along a Parker spiral, with origin at the associated solar active region, and curvature determined by the measured solar wind speed. The analyses take fully into account the appropriate light-propagation-time corrections from the radio source to the observing spacecraft as the exciters propagate along the Parker spiral path. For the five in-situ type III bursts analyzed in detail here, we found that their initial exciter speeds, near the Sun, ranged from to , where is the speed of light. This is significantly higher than the exciter speeds derived from other recent analyses. The results presented here further suggest that the type III electron exciters normally decelerate as they propagate through the interplanetary medium. We argue based on the observations by the widely separated spacecraft that the initial part of the type III radiation usually occurs at the fundamental of the plasma frequency. Finally, we compare the results for the exciter speeds to all previous determinations and provide quantitative arguments to explain the differences.