Speaker
Mr
Rishi Mistry
(Imperial College London)
Description
Magnetic reconnection at the magnetopause and magnetotail
affect many magnetospheric
dynamics including the onset of magnetospheric sub-storms
and space weather effects, and the
balance of energy in the magnetosphere. In these
environments, however, asymmetric boundary
conditions and imprecise knowledge of the motion of
reconnection exhausts relative to spacecraft
affect the extent to which we can observationally study
reconnection in these environments. Solar
wind reconnection exhausts, however, frequently form large-
scale structures which propagate past
spacecraft in a regular manner. This makes the solar wind an
excellent environment in which to
study basic reconnection physics.
In this study we have identified multiple solar wind
reconnection exhausts in the Cluster data set
and further analysed an existing data set from Wind. With
Cluster and Wind we analyse these
exhausts with high cadence measurements. These high
cadence measurements reveal further
magnetic structure across the exhaust than can be seen with
lower cadence measurements, and
show several types of qualitatively distinct magnetic field
profiles within the data set. Furthermore,
we investigate asymmetries of the magnetic field profiles,
and the structure of the boundaries of
bifurcated reconnection exhausts.
Primary author
Mr
Rishi Mistry
(Imperial College London)
Co-authors
Dr
Heli Hietala
(Imperial College London)
Dr
Jonathan Eastwood
(Imperial College London)
Dr
Tai Phan
(Space Sciences Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley)
