Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics
Scientific paper
2004-04-16
Astrophys.J. 610 (2004) 1117-1128
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics
15 pages, 6 figures
Scientific paper
10.1086/421842
In order to understand the nature of magnetic reconnection in ``free space'' which is free from any influence of external circumstances, I have studied the structure of spontaneous reconnection outflow using a shock tube approximation. The reconnection system of this case continues to expand self-similarly. This work aims 1) to solve the structure of reconnection outflow and 2) to clarify the determination mechanism of reconnection rate of the ``self-similar evolution model'' of fast reconnection. Many cases of reconnection in astrophysical phenomena are characterized by a huge dynamic range of expansion in size ($\sim 10^7$ for typical solar flares). Although such reconnection is intrinsically time dependent, a specialized model underlying the situation has not been established yet. The theoretical contribution of this paper is in obtaining a solution for outflow structure which is absent in our previous papers proposing the above new model. The outflow has a shock tube-like structure, i.e., forward slow shock, reverse fast shock and contact discontinuity between them. By solving the structure in a sufficiently wide range of plasma-$\beta$: $0.001 \leq \beta \leq 100$, we obtain an almost constant reconnection rate ($\sim 0.05$: this value is the maximum for spontaneous reconnection and is consistent with previous models) and a boundary value along the edge of the outflow (good agreement with our simulation result) which is important to solve the inflow region. Note that everything, including the reconnection rate, is spontaneously determined by the reconnection system itself in our model.
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