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A rendering of the magnetic field lines of the magnetosphere of the Earth.. In astronomy and planetary science, a magnetosphere is a region of space surrounding an astronomical object in which charged particles are affected by that object's magnetic field.
Schematic of the Birkeland or Field-Aligned Currents and the ionospheric current systems they connect to, Pedersen and Hall currents. [1]A Birkeland current (also known as field-aligned current, FAC) is a set of electrical currents that flow along geomagnetic field lines connecting the Earth's magnetosphere to the Earth's high latitude ionosphere.
(This simple definition assumes a noon-midnight plane of symmetry, but closed fields lacking such symmetry also must have cusps, by the fixed point theorem.) The amount of solar wind energy and plasma entering the actual magnetosphere depends on how far it departs from such a "closed" configuration, i.e. the extent to which Interplanetary ...
The plasmasphere, or inner magnetosphere, is a region of the Earth's magnetosphere consisting of low-energy (cool) plasma.It is located above the ionosphere.The outer boundary of the plasmasphere is known as the plasmapause, which is defined by an order of magnitude drop in plasma density.
Magnetic reconnection is a breakdown of "ideal-magnetohydrodynamics" and so of "Alfvén's theorem" (also called the "frozen-in flux theorem") which applies to large-scale regions of a highly-conducting magnetoplasma, for which the Magnetic Reynolds Number is very large: this makes the convective term in the induction equation dominate in such regions.
Artistic representation of Earth's magnetosphere. The plasma sheet is highlighted in yellow. In the magnetosphere, the plasma sheet is a sheet-like region of denser (0.3-0.5 ions/cm 3 versus 0.01-0.02 in the lobes) [citation needed] hot plasma and lower magnetic field located on the magnetotail and near the equatorial plane, between the magnetosphere's north and south lobes.
These medium wave emissions were modulated with a period of about 10 h 30 min, which was interpreted as Saturn's rotation period. [10] Nevertheless, the evidence available in the 1970s was too inconclusive and some scientists thought that Saturn might lack a magnetic field altogether, while others even speculated that the planet could lie ...
Venus and Mars do not have radiation belts, as their magnetospheric configurations do not trap energetic charged particles in orbit around the planet. Geomagnetic storms can cause electron density to increase or decrease relatively quickly (i.e., approximately one day or less). Longer-timescale processes determine the overall configuration of ...