The Dungey-Alfvén Magnetosphere

Physics

Scientific paper

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[2740] Magnetospheric Physics / Magnetospheric Configuration And Dynamics, [2784] Magnetospheric Physics / Solar Wind/Magnetosphere Interactions

Scientific paper

Earth’s magnetosphere can be thought of as comprising two types of magnetospheres that have different structural and dynamical properties. We label these the Chapman-Ferraro (C-F) magnetosphere and the Dungey-Alfvén (D-A) magnetosphere. It is an accident of the statistical distributions of the values that characterize solar wind parameters at 1 AU that the C-F mode dominates over the D-A mode most of the time. Also, the C-F mode was conceived first and for a long time set the problems on which early researchers in the field worked. In the early days of solar-terrestrial studies, manifestations of the D-A mode that were observed were accounted for by modifying the ideal C-F magnetosphere but retaining its essential nature or by adding ad hoc non-CF processes to it. The non-CF aspects were thought of as imperfections in the C-F model. For these two reasons—the D-A magnetosphere operating most of the time within a CF-dominant magnetosphere and D-A manifestations being misunderstood as imperfections or add-ons—the Dungey-Alfvén magnetosphere went unrecognized for the most part until global MHD simulations allowed us to isolate it and see it as a new, non-CF-like kind of global magnetosphere with rather remarkable properties. Our purpose here is to display the properties of the D-A magnetosphere and to contrast them with the well-known C-F magnetosphere. The many and considerable differences result chiefly, but not wholly, from the equilibrium D-A magnetosphere having massively depleted magnetic flux on the dayside and a correspondingly massively increased magnetic flux on the nightside.

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