Warping of Saturn's magnetospheric and magnetotail current sheets
By C. Arridge, K. Khurana, C. Russell, D. Southwood, N. Achilleos, M. Dougherty, A. Coates, H. Leinweber. 2008
177 citations recorded by the source corpus.
[1] The magnetotails of Jupiter and Earth are known to be hinged so that their orientation is controlled by the magnetic field of the planet at small distances and asymptotically approach the direction of the flow of the solar wind at large distances. In this paper we present Cassini observations showing that Saturn's magnetosphere is also similarly hinged. Furthermore, we find that Saturn's magnetosphere is not only hinged in the tail but also on the dayside, in contrast to the Jovian and terrestrial magnetospheres. Over the midnight, dawn, and noon local time sectors we find that the current sheet is displaced above Saturn's rotational equator, and thus the current sheet adopts the shape of a bowl or basin. We present a model to describe the warped current sheet geometry and show that in order to properly describe the magnetic field in the magnetosphere, this hinging must be incorporated. We discuss the impact on plasma observations made in Saturn's equatorial plane, the influence on Titan's magnetospheric interaction, and the effect of periodicities on the mean current sheet structure.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Molecular Biology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0d3681ae74b76b5fb42bda2a911fb215f48780f0
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In Astronomy and Astrophysics
Citations in the corpus
- A new form of Saturn's magnetopause using a dynamic pressure balance model, based on in situ, multi-instrument Cassini measurements (2010, methodology): “This corresponds to a field strength of several nanoteslas, which is common in Saturn’s outer magnetosphere [e.g., Arridge et al., 2008b].”