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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 largest occurring current sheet in the Solar System is the so-called heliospheric current sheet, which is about 10,000 km thick, and extends from the Sun and out beyond the orbit of Pluto. In astrophysical plasmas such as the solar corona, current sheets theoretically might have an aspect ratio (breadth divided by thickness) as high as ...
The heliospheric current sheet, or interplanetary current sheet, is a surface separating regions of the heliosphere where the interplanetary magnetic field points toward and away from the Sun. [1] A small electrical current with a current density of about 10 −10 A /m 2 flows within this surface, forming a current sheet confined to this surface.
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.
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.
A transport equation, usually of heat (sometimes of light element concentration): = + where T is temperature, = / is the thermal diffusivity with k thermal conductivity, heat capacity, and density, and is an optional heat source. Often the pressure is the dynamic pressure, with the hydrostatic pressure and centripetal potential removed.
In electromagnetism, an eddy current (also called Foucault's current) is a loop of electric current induced within conductors by a changing magnetic field in the conductor according to Faraday's law of induction or by the relative motion of a conductor in a magnetic field. Eddy currents flow in closed loops within conductors, in planes ...
The ring current system consists of a band, at a distance of 3 to 8 R E, [1] which lies in the equatorial plane and circulates clockwise around the Earth (when viewed from the north). The particles of this region produce a magnetic field in opposition to the Earth's magnetic field and so an Earthly observer would observe a decrease in the ...