Abstract
Many cosmic objects—planets, stars, galaxies—possess magnetic fields. A fundamental question of modern astrophysics is: What are their sources? Perhaps, the first attempt to answer this question was made by Gilbert in 1600 [1], who suggested that the main Earth’s magnetic field can be explained by magnetisation of substance in its interior. However, nowadays it is well-known, that already at a depth as small as 30 km the temperature inside the Earth is higher than the Curie point for the constituting rocks [2]. (A Curie point of a ferromagnetic is the temperature at which it becomes paramagnetic, i.e., it fails to remain magnetised when heated above the Curie point.) Consequently, such an explanation would imply that magnetisation of the rocks is unrealistically high (see, however, [3]).
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Notes
- 1.
We use the modifier “combined” in definitions of eddy effects to emphasize that there is interaction of magnetic and flow velocity perturbations, and as a result each of the two perturbations is affected by them both. This mutual influence is described by operators of a similar structure, which identifies the kind of a combined eddy effect.
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© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Zheligovsky, V. (2011). Introduction. In: Large-Scale Perturbations of Magnetohydrodynamic Regimes. Lecture Notes in Physics, vol 829. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-18170-2_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-18170-2_1
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