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Schematic view of the different current systems which shape the Earth's magnetosphere. In many MHD systems most of the electric current is compressed into thin nearly-two-dimensional ribbons termed current sheets. [10] These can divide the fluid into magnetic domains, inside of which the currents are relatively weak.
Interplanetary magnetic field. The heliospheric current sheet is a three-dimensional form of a Parker spiral that results from the influence of the Sun 's rotating magnetic field on the plasma in the interplanetary medium. [1] The interplanetary magnetic field (IMF), also commonly referred to as the heliospheric magnetic field (HMF), [2] is the ...
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. In the Earth's magnetosphere, the currents are driven by the solar wind and interplanetary magnetic field (IMF) and by bulk motions ...
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. In 1963 American scientist Don Carpenter and Soviet ...
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.
H {\displaystyle H} is the magnitude of the applied magnetic field (A/m), T {\displaystyle T} is absolute temperature (K), C {\displaystyle C} is a material-specific Curie constant (K). Pierre Curie discovered this relation, now known as Curie's law, by fitting data from experiment. It only holds for high temperatures and weak magnetic fields.
where is the Boltzmann constant, is the mass of the ion, is its charge, is the temperature of the electrons and is the temperature of the ions. Normally γ e is taken to be unity, on the grounds that the thermal conductivity of electrons is large enough to keep them isothermal on the time scale of ion acoustic waves, and γ i is taken to be 3 ...