How Magnetically Open are Magnetic Clouds Beyond 1 AU?

Details How Magnetically Open are Magnetic Clouds Beyond 1 AU? How Magnetically Open are Magnetic Clouds Beyond 1 AU?

Dec 2002

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2002agufmsh21a0475c&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2002, abstract #SH21A-0475

Physics

2111 Ejecta, Driver Gases, And Magnetic Clouds, 2134 Interplanetary Magnetic Fields, 7513 Coronal Mass Ejections

Scientific paper

From suprathermal electron measurements, we know that magnetic clouds at 1 AU contain a mix of primarily open and closed magnetic field lines and that the open field lines constitute roughly 40%, on average. Presumably these open field lines are created gradually by interchange reconnection in one leg of the cloud back at the Sun, where an open field line reconnects with a field line in the cloud that is attached to the Sun at both ends, thus interchanging a closed loop in the heliosphere for a closed loop in the corona. What is not known is whether interchange reconnection continues well beyond 1 AU until clouds become completely open. The answer to this question has important implications for the heliospheric magnetic flux budget, since closed fields in interplanetary coronal mass ejections (ICMEs) build up flux in the heliosphere. Although clouds are a small fraction of all ICMEs, they provide more accurate measures of total open flux because their boundaries are independent of the counterstreaming electron signatures used to identify closed fields. We analyze the clearest clouds in Ulysses data to determine the percentage of open flux in each case, taking into account the fact that the percentage of open flux in clouds at 1 AU decreases with increasing cloud size and that cloud size increases with distance from the Sun. Preliminary results suggest that clouds beyond 1 AU are only slightly more open, implying that the rate of interchange reconnection in the leg of an ICME slows significantly when its leading portion is not far beyond 1 AU.

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