187 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 demonstrates that in stratified plasmas under gravity, favorable density stratification suppresses tearing mode reconnection while unfavorable stratification strongly destabilizes it, eliminating the classical constant-ψ regime and replacing it with a gravity-driven G-mode that scales as , thereby permitting only rapidly reconnecting modes.
This study reconstructs and analyzes the first four ground-level enhancements (GLEs) from the 1940s by digitizing forgotten cosmic-ray data, revealing distinct temporal evolution patterns and spectral hardness characteristics for these historically missing events.
By challenging the traditional view that Earth's life is an uninformative data point and applying Daniel Whitmire's corrected anthropic reasoning, this study establishes a pessimistic lower limit on the number of extraterrestrial civilizations that effectively excludes the possibility of humanity being alone in the observable universe, yielding a 97.6% probability that other communicating civilizations exist.
This paper presents a methodology for inferring magnetic polarities of far-side solar active regions using helioseismic signatures and Hales' law, thereby enabling the creation of polarity-resolved far-side magnetograms to improve full-Sun magnetic modeling and space-weather forecasting.
This study combines experimental and numerical methods to demonstrate that in microgravity, granular drag is dominated by inertial forces with a constant drag coefficient, whereas gravity introduces an additional velocity-dependent stress term, revealing distinct scaling laws and cavity dynamics crucial for future space missions.
This paper proposes a novel Model Predictive Control framework for solar sails that effectively manages reaction wheel momentum and attitude by integrating active mass translation and reflectivity control devices through tailored discretization, PWM-inspired quantization, and an iterative backwards-in-time optimization approach to handle coupled nonlinear dynamics and discrete actuator constraints.
This paper introduces ARCANE, a novel framework that achieves robust, early detection of interplanetary coronal mass ejections in streaming solar wind data by leveraging a ResUNet++ machine learning model, which significantly outperforms threshold-based baselines while maintaining high performance even with real-time data constraints.
By identifying the granular Bond number as the key control parameter, this study unifies contradictory findings on granular clogging across different gravitational environments and establishes a predictive scaling law for flow behavior in low-gravity space missions.
This paper presents a comprehensive linear and numerical analysis of the two-dimensional Kelvin-Helmholtz instability in collisionless plasmas with anisotropic pressure, revealing that the magnetohydrodynamic limit yields significantly larger growth rates, current densities, and magnetic island formation compared to the anisotropic CGL regime where energy is diverted into pressure anisotropies.
This paper proposes a computationally efficient and fuel-optimal model predictive control strategy for areostationary Mars orbit satellites that utilizes a fuel-free natural motion trajectory as a reference to maintain station within one degree of longitude while accounting for Mars' complex gravitational perturbations.