Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics
Scientific paper
Apr 2002
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2002aps..apr.j4001k&link_type=abstract
American Physical Society, April Meeting, Jointly Sponsored with the High Energy Astrophysics Division (HEAD) of the American As
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics
Scientific paper
Protean implies changeful, fluid, mobile, mutable, unsettled, unstable, unsteady, variable, or weathery according to the Merriam Webster Collegiate Thesaurus. All of these terms apply to the magnetospheres of the solar system. Comparative magnetospheric studies are becoming ever more rewarding as increasingly sophisticated and extensive spacecraft measurements reveal the versatility of plasma processes that control magnetospheric dynamics. Several aspects of these processes are particularly relevant to the extension of our knowledge from the local to the universal. The importance of the magnetic field for organization of structure and dynamics is dramatically illustrated even by simple models of magnetospheres of differing scales in different plasma regimes. Variations of the large scale structure are controlled by magnetic reconnection whose inner workings have been identified in a few events and by planetary rotation, a process that becomes dominant at Jupiter. Still poorly understood are the processes by which particles are accelerated to ultra-relativistic energies, although great progress is being made in this area.
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