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 study statistically analyzes 20 Parker Solar Probe encounters to reveal that "hammerhead" proton velocity distributions, characterized by anisotropic beams with a constricted gap from the core, predominantly occur near the Heliospheric Current Sheet, suggesting they serve as key diagnostics for energization processes associated with the HCS and the solar wind.
This paper argues that a persistent, cycle-invariant discrepancy between radio brightness temperatures and hydrostatic scale-height modeling in the quiet solar corona provides evidence for non-Maxwellian, kappa-distributed electron velocity distributions with kappa values of approximately 2–3, rather than the turbulent scattering or standard thermal equilibrium models previously assumed.
This paper introduces a new 3D dynamical model, SOCOL:14C-Ex, to analyze the atmospheric production and transport of radiocarbon during extreme solar particle events, enabling the precise characterization and strength assessment of seven major Miyake events over the past 14,000 years, with the 12351 BC event identified as the strongest overall and the AD 774 event as the strongest of the Holocene.
This paper presents small-scale prototype testing and a novel, computationally-efficient control allocation algorithm for the CABLESSail concept, demonstrating its ability to effectively manage solar sail momentum through cable-actuated shape control while maintaining robustness against membrane shape uncertainties.
This paper utilizes 2D3V PIC simulations to demonstrate that in freely decaying sub-ion turbulence, intermittent regions with non-zero drive helicity reduction, motivating a new history-dependent helicity density that reveals time-invariant intermediate-scale plateaus consistent with kinetic decay constraints.
This White Paper advocates for a coordinated UK programme integrating high-precision observations, advanced theory, and machine learning to advance Magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) seismology, thereby addressing critical solar physics challenges and enhancing space weather forecasting capabilities.
This study utilizes surface flux transport modeling and randomized simulations to demonstrate that the non-random longitudinal distribution of active regions, particularly recurrent flux emergence in the southern hemisphere, significantly reinforced the large-scale equatorial magnetic field during the declining phase of solar cycle 24, while also showing that incorporating both axial and equatorial dipole components provides better constraints for model optimization than using the axial dipole alone.
This study demonstrates that velocity dispersion analysis (VDA) often yields inaccurate solar injection times and path lengths for Solar Energetic Particles because the method is significantly biased by interplanetary magnetic turbulence and the energy dependence of the pre-event proton background.
This study utilizes multi-point in-situ observations of Earth's bow shock to demonstrate that backstreaming ions create cavitons that facilitate the formation of a new quasi-parallel supercritical shock layer through the nonlinear growth driven by gyrating suprathermal ions and subsequent plasma compression.
This study characterizes the 2017 Mukundpura CM2 carbonaceous chondrite from Rajasthan, India, using high-resolution microscopy and Raman spectroscopy to confirm the presence of 3–5 nm nanocrystalline diamonds alongside graphitic carbon and abundant iridium, offering insights into stellar evolution and the geological impact anomalies associated with mass extinctions.