Estimation of the Size of an Electric Current with High Helium Abundance inside a Magnetic Cloud

Abstract

In a recent paper [1], based on the data from the OMNI solar wind measurement database and our catalog of large-scale solar wind phenomena (ftp://ftp.iki.rssi.ru/pub/omni/ [2]), it was shown that magnetic clouds contain an electric current with an elevated content of helium ions in the center of the event interval, while in Ejecta such structures are not observed. From simple geometric considerations, an upper estimate is obtained for the size of the cross section of the electric current, which is equal to ~10% of the linear size of the cross section of the magnetic cloud.