Earth's Alfv\'en wings driven by the April 2023 Coronal Mass Ejection
Abstract
We report a rare regime of Earth's magnetosphere interaction with sub-Alfv\'enic solar wind in which the windsock-like magnetosphere transforms into one with Alfv\'en wings. In the magnetic cloud of a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) on April 24, 2023, NASA's Magnetospheric Multiscale mission distinguishes the following features: (1) unshocked and accelerated cold CME plasma coming directly against Earth's dayside magnetosphere; (2) dynamical wing filaments representing new channels of magnetic connection between the magnetosphere and foot points of the Sun's erupted flux rope; (3) cold CME ions observed with energized counter-streaming electrons, evidence of CME plasma captured due to reconnection between magnetic-cloud and Alfv\'en-wing field lines. The reported measurements advance our knowledge of CME interaction with planetary magnetospheres, and open new opportunities to understand how sub-Alfv\'enic plasma flows impact astrophysical bodies such as Mercury, moons of Jupiter, and exoplanets close to their host stars.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2402.08091,
title = {Earth's Alfv\'en wings driven by the April 2023 Coronal Mass Ejection},
author = {Li-Jen Chen and Daniel Gershman and Brandon Burkholder and Yuxi Chen and Menelaos Sarantos and Lan Jian and James Drake and Chuanfei Dong and Harsha Gurram and Jason Shuster and Daniel Graham and Olivier Le Contel and Steven Schwartz and Stephen Fuselier and Hadi Madanian and Craig Pollock and Haoming Liang and Matthew Argall and Richard Denton and Rachel Rice and Jason Beedle and Kevin Genestreti and Akhtar Ardakani and Adam Stanier and Ari Le and Jonathan Ng and Naoki Bessho and Megha Pandya and Frederick Wilder and Christine Gabrieles and Ian Cohen and Hanying Wei and Christopher T. Russell and Robert Ergun and Roy Torbert and James Burch},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.08091},
year = {2024}
}
Comments
14 pages, including 4 figures, Under review in Geophys. Res. Lett