Plasma-depleted Flux Tubes in the Saturnian Magnetosphere

Abstract:

Similar to Io’s mass loading in the jovian magnetosphere, Saturn’s moon, Enceladus, provides 100s of kilograms of water group neutrals and plasma to the planet’s magnetosphere every second. The newly added plasma, being accelerated and convecting outward due to the centrifugal force, is then lost through magnetic reconnection in the tail. To conserve the total magnetic flux established by the internal dynamo, the ‘empty’ reconnected magnetic flux must return from the tail back to the inner magnetosphere. At both Jupiter and Saturn, flux tubes with enhanced field strength relative to their surroundings have been detected and are believed to be taking the role of returning the magnetic flux. However, at Saturn, flux tubes with depressed field strength are also reported. To reveal the relationship between the two kinds of flux tubes, we have systematically surveyed all the available 1-sec magnetic field data measured by Cassini and studied their statistical properties. The spatial distributions show that enhanced-field flux tubes are concentrated near the equator and closer to the planet while depressed-field flux tubes are distributed in a larger latitudinal region and can be detected at larger distances. In addition, we find that for both types of flux tubes, their occurrence rates vary with the local time in the same pattern and their magnetic flux is in the same magnitude. Therefore, the two types of flux tubes are just different manifestations of the same phenomenon: near the equator with high ambient plasma density, the flux tubes convecting in from the tail are compressed, resulting in increased field strength; off the equator, these flux tubes expand slightly, resulting in decreased field strength. Here we also present the lifecycle of the enhanced-field flux tubes: they gradually break into smaller ones when convecting inward and become indistinguishable from the background inside an L-value of about 4.