Reconnection sites in Jupiter’s magnetotail and relation to Jovian auroras

The Galileo spacecraft explored Jupiter’s magnetotail in a low-inclination orbit, where it detected the signatures of tail reconnection. In this paper, we examine and classify the tail reconnection signatures into four types: dipolarizations, strong northward Bθ excursions, tailward-moving plasmoids and planetward-moving plasmoids. The distribution of these four types of events is used to infer the most probable location of the Jovian tail reconnection site to be near 0200 LT at a planetocentric distance of 80 Jovian radii. Dipolarizations are mainly observed planetward of this point, and strong northward Bθ excursions and plasmoids are found mostly tailward. The observations also suggest that the Jovian tail reconnection starts at a point (neutral point), a localized region in the tail, instead of along an extended azimuthal line (X-line). Using the updated Khurana’s Jupiter’s magnetospheric model, which includes the external field and the effects of the swept-back configuration of tail field lines, we map the signatures of Jovian tail reconnection into the Jupiter’s ionosphere. We confirm that the dawn auroral storms or the polar dawn spots observed by the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) are located close to the extrapolated footpoints of tail dipolarizations and could be the auroral signatures of tail reconnection.