Engineering-Physics Space Plasma Seminar

Meeting ID: 927 5142 0885
Email physics.department@dartmouth.edu for passcode

From May 10th–12th, 2024, a series of coronal mass ejections led to the Mother's Day Storm, one of the strongest geomagnetic storms of the century. MMS's position on the dayside magnetosphere on May 11th allows us to report in situ observations of an extremely driven and compressed (~6 Re) magnetopause boundary layer. In the boundary, MMS observed signatures consistent with a magnetic reconnection exhaust far downstream of a primary x-line with an average normalized reconnection rate of 0.28 and significant ion heating estimated to be ~30% of the available magnetic energy. The enhanced ion heating, ~50% higher than generally expected for the driving conditions, indicates the complexity of the boundary layer where MMS not only encounters several magnetic holes and crosses the magnetopause multiple times, but also sees significantly enhanced singly charged oxygen (O+) magnetospheric outflows. Together, these signatures highlight how the magnetopause boundary layer reacts to extreme driving conditions and enables enhanced energy conversion throughout the magnetosphere system.

Hosted by Professor Yi-Hsin Liu

About the Speaker(s)

Jason Beedle
Research Scientist, UNH

Contact

For more information, contact Dept of Physics at physics.department@dartmouth.edu.