Quantifying the tailward motion of reconnecting flux ropes at magnetopauses of Earth and other planets

Abstract:

Flux ropes caused by magnetic reconnection commonly form at the dayside magnetopauses of Earth and other planets, such as Mercury and Jupiter. They are convected tailward due to their interaction with the solar wind and as the result of reconnection. The leading model for their tailward propagation speed at Earth’s magnetopause has been described using boundary layer physics (Cowley and Owen, Planet. Space Sci., 37, 1461, 1989). We revisit this topic, noting that during times when the reconnection at both X-lines bracketing the flux ropes remain active, there should be consistency with the scaling laws of asymmetric magnetic reconnection with a flow shear. The convection speed of an isolated reconnecting X-line as a function of arbitrary upstream plasma parameters, including the reconnecting magnetic fields, densities, and upstream flow in the plane of the fields, was recently calculated analytically and tested with two-fluid simulations (Doss et al., J. Geophys. Res., submitted). Here, we present fully electromagnetic kinetic particle-in-cell simulations of local asymmetric reconnection with a flow shear that confirm the prediction in collisionless plasmas relevant to planetary magnetospheres. It is notable that the X-line convects even for sub-Alfvenic flow shear and can reconnect even for flow speeds exceeding twice the magnetosheath Alfven speed, which counters previous models. The application of these results for flux rope motion in global magnetospheric simulations of Earth is discussed, as are applications to the magnetospheres of other planets.