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 numerical study demonstrates that MHD turbulent simulations using the expanding box model can reproduce the observed 1/R radial temperature profile of the slow solar wind between 0.2 and 1 AU, provided the turbulence begins with a Mach number of unity and a quasi-2D spectral anisotropy, albeit with limitations imposed by the modest Reynolds numbers achievable at such high Mach speeds.
This paper introduces the Local Ionospheric Forecast Transformer (LIFT), a novel transformer-based model that generates accurate 24-hour forecasts and nonparametric uncertainty bounds for key ionospheric parameters (foF2, hmF2, and TEC) by assimilating exogenous solar and geomagnetic variables with climatology, demonstrating superior generalization and performance compared to the International Reference Ionosphere (IRI).
This first-principles numerical study reveals that while the ion-acoustic instability drives intense wave activity and substantial ion heating in magnetic reconnection with low ion-to-electron temperature ratios, its contribution to anomalous resistivity is minimal.
This paper introduces a new method to quantify the multi-scale spatial complexity of flare ribbon substructure using box-counting and correlation dimensions, demonstrating that increased complexity serves as an observational proxy for current-sheet fragmentation and correlates strongly with hard X-ray emission, reconnection rates, and non-thermal velocities.
This study employs a novel three-fluid numerical model to systematically map the transition of magnetic reconnection in partially ionized plasmas across ion-neutral collisionality and ionization fraction, revealing a shift from a -scaled regime to a fast, ionization-independent regime where current sheets thin to the ion inertial length and outflows remain Alfvénic.
This study demonstrates that Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) can significantly accelerate relativistic protons in the solar wind through a mechanism involving multiple shock crossings driven by magnetic compression, mirror forces, and pitch-angle scattering, with acceleration efficiency scaling inversely with the parallel mean free path.
This paper analyzes a unique dataset of measurements and model outputs from the severe May 2024 geomagnetic storm to evaluate the accuracy of GIC predictions by power operators and global models, while establishing empirical relationships between geomagnetic parameters and GIC magnitudes across the contiguous United States.
This paper demonstrates that turbulent heating in plasma systems, such as the solar wind, can be thermodynamically modeled as fluctuating polytropic processes, which generate subadiabatic cooling and heating rates that align with observational data on pickup ion energy transfer.
This paper establishes fundamental upper bounds on the quantum bit error rate (QBER) and achievable transmission distance for quantum key distribution by deriving a universal capacity threshold for qubit Pauli channels that applies to various protocols and physical environments, from fiber optics to deep-space links.
This paper presents the first observations of anomalous cosmic ray helium by Solar Orbiter's High Energy Telescope between 0.3 and 1 au, deriving a radial gradient of approximately 22–32%/au and demonstrating that these gradients increase with enhanced solar modulation and a larger heliospheric current sheet tilt angle.