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Schematic view of the different current systems which shape the Earth's magnetosphere. In many MHD systems most of the electric current is compressed into thin nearly-two-dimensional ribbons termed current sheets. [10] These can divide the fluid into magnetic domains, inside of which the currents are relatively weak.
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 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 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 ...
The amount of solar wind energy and plasma entering the actual magnetosphere depends on how far it departs from such a "closed" configuration, i.e. the extent to which Interplanetary Magnetic Field field lines manage to cross the boundary. As discussed further below, that extent depends very much on the direction of the Interplanetary Magnetic ...
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.
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.
Ekman number (defined above), which is the ratio between the two remaining forces, namely the viscosity and Coriolis force, is very low inside Earth's outer core, because its viscosity is low (1.2–1.5 ×10 −2 pascal-second [20]) due to its liquidity.