179 papers
Space physics explores the dynamic environment surrounding our planet and the wider solar system, focusing on how charged particles, magnetic fields, and solar winds interact with celestial bodies. This field helps us understand phenomena like auroras, space weather that can disrupt satellites, and the fundamental behavior of plasma in the vacuum of space. It bridges the gap between astronomy and particle physics, revealing the invisible forces that shape our cosmic neighborhood.
At Gist.Science, we process every new preprint in this category as it appears on arXiv, ensuring you get immediate access to the latest research. For each paper, we provide both a detailed technical summary for experts and a plain-language explanation that makes complex concepts understandable for everyone. Below are the latest space physics papers from arXiv, curated and simplified for your reading.
This paper proposes and evaluates a feasibility study for verifying compliance with the Outer Space Treaty's ban on nuclear weapons in space by using a 9U CubeSat to detect neutrons induced by cosmic protons interacting with a potential thermonuclear device, demonstrating the ability to identify such a weapon from 4 km away within a week.
This statistical study of approximately 800 interplanetary shocks observed by the Wind spacecraft reveals that proton temperature anisotropy downstream is strongly shaped by shock geometry, deviates from adiabatic predictions due to non-adiabatic processes, and is regulated by kinetic instabilities that constrain the plasma as it relaxes toward typical solar wind conditions.
This paper establishes that relativistic drag on macroscopic interstellar probes is primarily a thermodynamic challenge rather than a kinematic one, as extreme thermal loading from baryonic collisions at speeds exceeding 0.5c poses a fatal survival threat long before the probe experiences significant deceleration.
This paper analytically demonstrates that gravitational perturbations from satellites can create off-equatorial rings around minor planets like trans-neptunian objects and centaurs, deriving specific orbital criteria for these misaligned structures to be tested by upcoming deep sky surveys.
This paper employs a three-dimensional magnetohydrodynamic model to demonstrate that forward modelling of Lyman-alpha emission from neutral hydrogen in the near-star region of an astrosphere is a feasible method for creating two-dimensional maps that constrain stellar wind properties and astrospheric morphology, despite the absorption of distant hydrogen wall emissions by the interstellar medium.
To resolve the long-standing open-flux problem where traditional models underestimate solar magnetic flux, this paper introduces a Non-Spherical Potential Field (NSPF) model featuring a Non-Spherical Source Surface that successfully reproduces complex coronal topologies and aligns extrapolated open flux with in-situ measurements.
By employing a multi-hierarchy framework that couples MHD and particle-in-cell simulations to solve a two-dimensional Riemann problem, this study demonstrates that Petschek-like reconnection with switch-off slow shocks remains viable in collisionless-collisional systems like solar flares, as these shocks can form in the MHD domain even when suppressed in the PIC domain, subsequently promoting plasma isotropization.
This paper utilizes numerical simulations with the Spacecraft Plasma Interaction Software to model and validate how photo- and secondary electron emissions from the Solar Orbiter spacecraft contaminate low-energy electron measurements by the SWA-EAS instrument, revealing that such contamination extends well above the spacecraft potential threshold due to emissions from distant surfaces and highlighting a discrepancy between the simulated and observed spectral breaks that suggests a difference between the detector's actual and measured potentials.
This paper derives analytic solutions demonstrating that turbulence-dominated scattering of non-thermal electrons significantly enhances coronal heating while suppressing chromospheric heating and reducing return-current effects, thereby offering a potential resolution to longstanding discrepancies in solar flare models.
This paper presents a unified, frequency-independent method based on Kolmogorov turbulence assumptions to simultaneously estimate solar wind velocities and coronal electron densities from Doppler spectral broadening, which was validated using S-band and X-band radio data from the Mars Orbiter Mission and Akatsuki spacecraft across various heliocentric distances.