Theory of the plasma sheet in the jovian magnetosphere

The magnetic field in the middle magnetosphere of Jupiter was suggested to be the planetary dipole field plus a perturbation field due to a current sheet (Smith et al, 1974). Since no data of the low energy plasma are available the existence of a plasma sheet could not be confirmed directly. In this paper we show how the plasma pressure and density-can be derived from the magnetic field in the framework of a self-consistent theory. For the magnetic field model proposed by Goertz et al. (1976c) we compute the isobars and isodensity lines and confirm the existence of a thin plasma sheet.