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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.
In the height region between about 85 and 200 km altitude on Earth, the ionospheric plasma is electrically conducting. Atmospheric tidal winds due to differential solar heating or due to gravitational lunar forcing move the ionospheric plasma against the geomagnetic field lines thus generating electric fields and currents just like a dynamo coil moving against magnetic field lines.
The impact of the solar wind onto the magnetosphere generates an electric field within the inner magnetosphere (r < 10 a; with a the Earth's radius) - the convection field. [1] Its general direction is from dawn to dusk. The co-rotating thermal plasma within the inner magnetosphere drifts orthogonal to that field and to the geomagnetic field B o.
The coolest of these, 2MASS J10475385+2124234 with a temperature of 800-900 K, retains a magnetic field stronger than 1.7 kG, making it some 3000 times stronger than the Earth's magnetic field. [18] Radio observations also suggest that their magnetic fields periodically change their orientation, similar to the Sun during the solar cycle .
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.
STORM’s 4 imagers, the soft x-ray imager (XRI)[5], the far ultraviolet imager (FUV), the energetic neutral atom imager (ENA), and LAICA, make nearly continuous observations of the magnetopause and bow shock, the auroral oval, the Earth’s ring current, and the exosphere (respectively).
A telluric current (from Latin tellūs 'earth'), or Earth current, [1] is an electric current that flows underground or through the sea, resulting from natural and human-induced causes. These currents have extremely low frequency and traverse large areas near or at Earth 's surface.
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.