Observation of Two Slow Shocks Associated with Magnetic Reconnection Exhausts in the Interplanetary Space

In the Petschek magnetic reconnection model, two groups of slow shocks play an important role in the energy release. In the past half century, a large number of slow shocks were observed in the geomagnetic tail, and many slow shocks were associated with magnetic reconnection events in the geomagnetic tail. Slow shocks in the interplanetary space are rarer than in the geomagnetic tail. We investigated whether slow shocks associated with interplanetary reconnection exhausts are rare. We examined the boundaries of 50 reconnection exhausts reported by Phan, Gosling, and Davis (Geophys. Res. Lett. 36:L09108, 2009) in interplanetary space to identify slow shocks by fitting the Rankine–Hugoniot relations. Two slow shocks associated with magnetic reconnection exhausts were found and evaluated using observations from Wind and the Advanced Composition Explorer. The observed slow shocks associated with interplanetary reconnection exhausts are rarer than the observed slow shocks associated with geomagnetic tail reconnection exhausts.