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Description
Mercury’s magnetosphere is small, highly dynamic, and strongly driven by magnetic reconnection. During the third BepiColombo flyby, the spacecraft observed intense wave activity that appears closely linked to these reconnection processes.
In this work, we investigate the global characteristics of magnetic reconnection at Mercury using two fully kinetic 3D simulations performed with iPIC3D. The simulations model the interaction between the solar wind and Mercury’s magnetosphere under southward interplanetary magnetic field conditions, maximizing magnetic coupling.
Our results show significant wave activity originating near the reconnection region on the magnetosphere nighside and propagates across the nightside magnetosphere. In this region, we find an increase in electron temperature along with the emergence of narrowband whistler waves. These waves propagate nearly parallel to the magnetic field at about half the electron cyclotron frequency (∼0.5 f_ce), and they display both electromagnetic and electrostatic components. We also observe pronounced electron temperature anisotropy, indicating that it likely plays an important role in driving these waves.