Soft X‐Ray Emission From Saturn's Magnetosheath Part I : 3D Modeling From MHD Data

Rogan, P. C. and Ray, L. C. and Naylor, D. and Dunn, W. R. and Jia, X. and Smith, H. T. and Sulaiman, A. (2026) Soft X‐Ray Emission From Saturn's Magnetosheath Part I : 3D Modeling From MHD Data. Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics, 131 (5): e2025JA034. ISSN 2169-9402

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Abstract

Plain Language Summary: Water plumes at the south pole of Enceladus supply the space around Saturn with a mix of neutral particles, including H2O, OH, oxygen, and hydrogen. These disperse out to the magnetosheath, a region of space where the solar wind meets Saturn's magnetic field. Here, these neutrals collide with highly ionized oxygen in the solar wind to emit X‐rays via a process known as charge exchange. We employ an MHD (magnetohydrodynamic) model, which simulates the flow of the solar wind like a fluid around Saturn's magnetic field, and produce a 3D map of the X‐ray emission generated. We explore whether this emission is bright enough to be captured by a probe equipped with a soft X‐ray imager (SXI), sensitive to the X‐rays we expect, and find that while the X‐ray emission is bright enough to be visible, integration times are too long to easily generate an “instantaneous” map of the system.