Generating Sawtooth Oscillations

摘要

Earth's magnetosphere is subject to sawtooth oscillations as it responds to the constant battering of the solar wind, the stream of charged particles coming from the Sun. Although observations have uncovered many of the properties of this type of disturbance, the mechanism that generates it is unclear. Based on numerical simulations of the interaction of the solar wind with the magnetosphere and the ionosphere, Brambles et al. (p. 1183) now show that the flow of O~+ ions from the ionosphere to the magnetosphere can produce sawtooth oscillations.