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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.
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.
A current sheet is an electric current that is confined to a surface, rather than being spread through a volume of space. Current sheets feature in magnetohydrodynamics (MHD), a model of electrically conductive fluids : if there is an electric current through part of the volume of such a fluid, magnetic forces tend to expel it from the fluid ...
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.
The fluxgate magnetometer (FGM) is similar to previous instruments flown on spacecraft like the Voyagers, Magsat, Active Magnetospheric Particle Tracer Explorers, Mars Global Surveyor, etc. [10] This style of FGM uses twin wide-range, triaxial flux gate sensors mounted far away from the spacecraft body in which the magnetic flux is periodically switched (hence the ame flux-gate). [10]
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 ...
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.