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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 two-stream instability is a very common instability in plasma physics. It can be induced by an energetic particle stream injected in a plasma, or setting a current along the plasma so different species (ions and electrons) can have different drift velocities.
The remaining terms predict that the potential of a dipole source (ℓ=1) drops off as 1/r 2. The magnetic field, being a derivative of the potential, drops off as 1/r 3. Quadrupole terms drop off as 1/r 4, and higher order terms drop off increasingly rapidly with the radius. The radius of the outer core is about half of the radius of the Earth.
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.
The magnetosphere of Jupiter is the largest planetary magnetosphere in the Solar System, extending up to 7,000,000 kilometers (4,300,000 mi) on the dayside and almost to the orbit of Saturn on the nightside. [17] Jupiter's magnetosphere is stronger than Earth's by an order of magnitude, and its magnetic moment is approximately 18,000 times ...
The Dungey cycle, officially proposed by James Dungey in 1961, [1] is a phenomenon that explains interactions between a planet's magnetosphere and solar wind. [2] Dungey originally proposed a cyclic behavior of magnetic reconnection between Earth's magnetosphere and flux of solar wind.
These two magnetic domains are separated by a current sheet (an electric current that is confined to a curved plane). This heliospheric current sheet has a shape similar to a twirled ballerina skirt , and changes in shape through the solar cycle as the Sun's magnetic field reverses about every 11 years.
The convection circulation in the ionosphere and magnetosphere for these non-steady conditions is explained by the "expanding contracting polar cap" (ECPC) model and the Dungey Cycle is understood in terms of the plasma (and frozen-in field) motions returning the magnetosphere-ionosphere system towards equilibrium after it has been perturbed by ...