Disturbances of cometary and Earth's magnetospheres by single solar flares

Abstract

Comets P/Brorsen‐Metcalf and C/Okazaki‐Levy‐Rudenko appeared successively in 1989 and displayed various disturbances of their magnetospheres. We observed two cases of a phenomenon in which a disconnection event of the cometary plasma tail (on August 13 and November 16, 1989) was followed by a terrestrial magnetic storm (on August 14 and November 17). A survey of solar flares suggests that an identical solar flare excited successively the cometary magnetosphere and the Earth's magnetosphere in each case. The average velocities of the shock front in interplanetary space were estimated by using the magnetospheric disturbances of both the comets and the Earth together with the assumed responsible solar flare. It is speculated from the results that the propagation of the shock front associated with the flare is not symmetric with respect to the radial axis from the flare region of the Sun.

Reconnection scaling experiment: A new device for three-dimensional magnetic reconnection studies

“…Magnetic reconnection in plasmas is considered to play a crucial role in a variety of different astrophysical and laboratory phenomena. Some examples are in the evolution of solar flares, 3,4 in the dynamics of the Earth magnetosphere, [5][6][7] and in the redistribution of the energy in the universe. 8 In magnetically confined laboratory plasmas for fusion research, a major role is played by magnetic reconnection in determining the dynamics of relaxation processes, such as sawtooth oscillations in tokamaks 9 and dynamo effects in reversed field pinches.…”