The nucleus of an active comet, such as comet Halley near its perihelion, produces large quantities of gas and dust. The resulting cometary atmosphere, or coma, extends more than a million kilometers into space, where it interacts with the solar wind. An ‘‘induced’’ cometary magnetosphere is a consequence of this interaction. Cometary ion pick-up and mass loading of the solar wind starts to tak...

[1] Results are presented from a survey of cold ion observations in the near-Earth magnetotail using data from the Polar Thermal Ion Dynamics Experiment (TIDE). During the interval from July to December of 2001, Polar had its apogee ( 9.5 RE) near the equatorial plane in the tail region of the magnetosphere. It is shown that a lobal wind is ubiquitous in the inner tail, with low-energy (<300 eV...

The accretion induced neutron star magnetic field evolution is studied through considering the accretion flow to drag the field lines aside and dilute the polar field strength, and as a result the equatorial field strength increases and is buried inside the crust. The main conclusions of model are as follows: (i) the polar field decays with increasing the accreted mass; (ii) The bottom magnetic...

[1] Magnetic reconnection in the magnetotail or other forms of current sheet disruption are believed to produce plasma bubbles, which consist of flux tubes that have lower entropy content PV than their surroundings. We present an initial Rice-Convection-Model-based simulation of the injection of a bubble into the inner magnetosphere and explore the consequences on ring current formation. As the...

Soon after the discovery of radio pulsars in 1967, the pulsars are identified as strongly magnetic (typically 10G) rapidly rotating (∼ 10−0.1 Hz) neutron stars. However, the mechanism of particle acceleration in the pulsar magnetosphere has been a longstanding problem. The central problem is why the rotation power manifests itself in both gamma-ray beams and a highly relativistic wind of electr...