Kinetic Generation of Whistler Waves in the Turbulent Magnetosheath

The Earth's magnetosheath (MSH) is governed by numerous physical processes which shape the particle velocity distributions and contribute to the heating of the plasma. Among them are whistler waves which can interact with electrons. We investigate whistler waves detected in the quasi‐parallel MSH by NASA's Magnetospheric Multiscale mission. We find that the whistler waves occur even in regions that are predicted stable to wave growth by electron temperature anisotropy. Whistlers are observed in ion‐scale magnetic minima and are associated with electrons having butterfly‐shaped pitch‐angle distributions. We investigate in detail one example and, with the support of modeling by the linear numerical dispersion solver Waves in Homogeneous, Anisotropic, Multicomponent Plasmas, we demonstrate that the butterfly distribution is unstable to the observed whistler waves. We conclude that the observed waves are generated locally. The result emphasizes the importance of considering complete 3D particle distribution functions, and not only the temperature anisotropy, when studying plasma wave instabilities.