Oxygen response to BBFs

What is it about?

Bursty bulk flows (BBFs) are transient phenomena in the magnetotail of earth, high speed streams of ions. These high speed streams constitute a significant part of the mass transfer from the tail back towards earth, a part of the magnetospheric circulation. The BBFs are dominated by and typically determined from measurements of the dominant ion, protons. We have studied how oxygen ions respond to BBFs. It is found that oxygen ions essentially do not take part in the proton BBFs, the oxygen ions observed during proton BBFs are not or only weakly accelerated. In general oxygen ions have much lower velocity than protons. We show that this is in part due to the large gyro radius of oxygen ions in the central magnetotail.

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Why is it important?

The circulation of oxygen ions may be important for the total loss of atmosphere from a magnetized planet such as earth, as the return flux of ions in the tail may reduce the atmospheric loss. More important i sthat oxygen ions affect the magnetosphere dynamics during magnetic storms and it is well established that the magnetosphere is enriched in oxygen content during storms. The slower transport of oxygen ions during storms will contribute to this engancement.

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