ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Astron. Space Sci.
Sec. Space Physics
Volume 12 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fspas.2025.1672108
This article is part of the Research TopicVariability in the Solar Wind and its Impact on the Coupled Magnetosphere-Ionosphere-Thermosphere System, Volume IIView all articles
The Connection of the Ions and Electrons in the Earth's Central Plasma Sheet to the Solar Wind
Provisionally accepted
- 1Space Science Institute (SSI), Boulder, United States
- 2UCLA, Los Alageles, United States
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The simple problems of the solar-wind number density driving the plasma-sheet number density and the solar-wind speed driving the plasma sheet temperature are examined. To ensure that the central plasma sheet is studied, 1017 current-sheet crossings in the plasma sheet are collected from 10.8 RE to 76.9 RE downtail and 3-s resolution ion and electron measurements from THEMIS-B and THEMIS-C are compared with time-lagged solar-wind number densities and speeds. The central-plasma-sheet measurements are the solar-minimum years of 2007-2009. Three correlation methods are used: (1) Pearson (univariate) linear correlations, (2) multivariate linear correlations, and (3) canonical correlation analysis. For both ions and electrons, knowing the solar-wind speed adds insignificant information to the solar-wind density versus plasma-sheet density correlations. Likewise, for both ions and electrons, knowing the solar-wind density adds insignificant information to the solar-wind speed versus plasma-sheet temperature correlations. The standard two problems (1) the density of the solar wind driving the density of the plasma sheet and (2) the velocity of the solar wind driving the temperature of the plasma sheet appear to be completely unrelated, despite the fact that the solar-wind density and the solar-wind velocity have a strong anticorrelation. Future work is outlined.
Keywords: plasma sheet, Solar wind, magnetosphere, coupling, Space weather
Received: 23 Jul 2025; Accepted: 18 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Borovsky and Espinoza. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Joseph E Borovsky, jborovsky@spacescience.org
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