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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.
The magnetosheath is the region of the magnetosphere between the bow shock and the magnetopause. It is formed mainly from shocked solar wind, though it contains a small amount of plasma from the magnetosphere. [8] It is an area exhibiting high particle energy flux, where the direction and magnitude of the magnetic field varies erratically.
The Van Allen radiation belt is a zone of energetic charged particles, most of which originate from the solar wind, that are captured by and held around a planet by that planet's magnetosphere. Earth has two such belts, and sometimes others may be temporarily created.
The radius of the outer core is about half of the radius of the Earth. If the field at the core-mantle boundary is fit to spherical harmonics, the dipole part is smaller by a factor of about 8 at the surface, the quadrupole part by a factor of 16, and so on. Thus, only the components with large wavelengths can be noticeable at the surface.
Magnetic reconnection in Earth's magnetosphere is one of the mechanisms responsible for the aurora, and it is important to the science of controlled nuclear fusion because it is one mechanism preventing magnetic confinement of the fusion fuel. These mechanisms are studied in outer space by the measurement of motions of matter in stellar ...
The magnetosphere contains charged particles that are trapped from the stellar wind, which then move along these field lines. As the star rotates, the magnetosphere rotates with it, dragging along the charged particles. [13] As stars emit matter with a stellar wind from the photosphere, the magnetosphere creates a torque on the ejected matter.
The plasma sheet in Saturn's magnetosphere has a bowl-like shape not found in any other known magnetosphere. When Cassini arrived in 2004, there was a winter in the northern hemisphere. The measurements of the magnetic field and plasma density revealed that the plasma sheet was warped and lay to the north of the equatorial plane, looking like a ...
[17] [18] As the mantle and core cooled over time, inner-core crystallization (which would provide latent heat) and chemical convection may have played a major role in driving the dynamo. Following inner-core formation, light elements migrated from the inner-core boundary into the liquid outer core and drove convection by buoyancy. [ 18 ]