SM020-0007
Secondary magnetic reconnection at Earth's flank magnetopause

Thursday, 10 December 2020
Poster
Binbin Tang1, Wenya Li2, Chi Wang3, Yuri Khotyaintsev4, Daniel Graham5, Qing-He Zhang6, Tianran Sun2, Hui Li2, Barbara L Giles7, Per-Arne Lindqvist8, Robert Ergun9, Christopher T Russell10 and James L Burch11, (1)NSSC National Space Science Center, CAS, SKL of Space Weather, Beijing, China, (2)NSSC National Space Science Center, CAS, Beijing, China, (3)CSSAR, CAS, Beijing, China, (4)IRF Swedish Institute of Space Physics, Uppsala, Sweden, (5)IRF Swedish Institute of Space Physics Uppsala, Uppsala, Sweden, (6)Institute of Space Sciences, Shandong University, Weihai, China, (7)NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, United States, (8)KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden, (9)Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, Boulder, CO, United States, (10)University of California, Los Angeles, CA, United States, (11)Southwest Research Institute San Antonio, San Antonio, TX, United States
Abstract:
The interaction between the solar wind and the Earth's magnetosphere is one of the most fundamental issues of magnetospheric physics, as it is key to understand various space weather phenomena. Although the framework of global plasma circulation in the magnetosphere has been established decades before, our understanding regarding to this process has been continuously improved, showing the complexity of the entire system. Here we report newly discovered secondary magnetic reconnection at Earth's flank magnetopause, where closed magnetic field lines in the magnetosphere reconnect with the open field lines, which are generated by the primary reconnection at dayside magnetopause, and then dragged to the flank region. We present evidence of the encounter of the electron diffusion region of reconnection, indicating a cross-scale process from a global scale to a small electron scale. The present secondary reconnection suggests a new pathway for the entry of the solar wind into geospace, providing an important modification to the classic magnetospheric plasma circulation.
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