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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.
Researchers have developed global models using MHD to simulate phenomena within Earth's magnetosphere, such as the location of Earth's magnetopause [24] (the boundary between the Earth's magnetic field and the solar wind), the formation of the ring current, auroral electrojets, [25] and geomagnetically induced currents.
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.
Schematic view of the different current systems which shape the Earth's magnetosphere Trapping of plasma , e.g. of the ring current , also follows the structure of field lines. A particle interacting with this B field experiences a Lorentz Force which is responsible for many of the particle motion in the magnetosphere.
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.
[1] [2] Schematic of Earth's magnetosphere, showing the relative position of the magnetosheath. Scientific research into the exact nature of the magnetosheath has been limited due to a longstanding misconception that it was a byproduct of the bow shock/magnetopause interaction and had no inherently important properties of its own.
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As with Earth's magnetosphere, the boundary separating the solar wind's plasma from that within Saturn's magnetosphere is called the magnetopause. [2] The magnetopause distance from the planet's center at the subsolar point [ note 1 ] varies widely from 16 to 27 R s (R s =60,330 km is the equatorial radius of Saturn).