Abstract
THE plasma precipitating into the Earth's dayside auroral atmosphere has characteristics which show that it originates from the shocked solar-wind plasma of the magnetosheath1'2. The particles of the magnetosheath plasma precipitate down a funnel-shaped region (cusp) of open field lines resulting from reconnection of the geomagnetic field with the interplanetary magnetic field3. Although the cusp has long been considered a well defined spatial structure maintained by continuous reconnection, it has recently been suggested4–6 that reconnection instead may take place in a series of discontinuous events; this is the ‘pulsating cusp model’. Here we present coordinated radar and satellite observations of a series of discrete, poleward-moving plasma structures that are consistent with the pulsating-cusp model.
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Lockwood, M., Denig, W., Farmer, A. et al. Ionospheric signatures of pulsed reconnection at the Earth's magnetopause. Nature 361, 424–428 (1993). https://doi.org/10.1038/361424a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/361424a0
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