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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. [1] [2] It is created by a celestial body with an active interior dynamo.
The "very nearly" qualifier sets it apart from true constants of motion, such as energy, reducing it to merely an "adiabatic invariant." For most plasmas in the magnetosphere, the deviation from constancy is negligible. [citation needed] The conservation of μ is tremendously important (in laboratory plasmas as well as in space).
The magnetosphere is defined by the extent of Earth's magnetic field in space or geospace. It extends above the ionosphere , several tens of thousands of kilometres into space , protecting Earth from the charged particles of the solar wind and cosmic rays that would otherwise strip away the upper atmosphere, including the ozone layer that ...
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.
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.
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.
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).
The heliosphere is the magnetosphere, astrosphere, and outermost atmospheric layer of the Sun.It takes the shape of a vast, tailed bubble-like region of space.In plasma physics terms, it is the cavity formed by the Sun in the surrounding interstellar medium.