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 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 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 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.
This paper presents a unified theoretical framework describing how ions gain perpendicular energy through magnetic moment breaking caused by localized electromagnetic fluctuations, offering a generic model for stochastic heating that applies to both Alfvénic turbulence and magnetic reconnection.
Using hybrid expanding box simulations initialized with Helios spacecraft data, this study demonstrates that the long-term evolution of proton beams in the solar wind is driven by the interplay of nonlinear Alfvén waves, expansion effects, and kinetic instabilities, successfully reproducing observed radial trends out to 1.5 AU.
During Parker Solar Probe's 24th encounter, the spacecraft flew near the base of a pseudo-streamer and detected a record-breaking 400 mV/m electric field in the plasma rest frame, which was balanced by Generalized Ohm's Law terms rather than an E×B drift within a confined, turbulent region of enhanced plasma density and reduced solar wind velocity.
This paper proposes a unified co-elliptic maneuver framework for multi-debris removal in Low Earth Orbit and demonstrates through comparative analysis that a Masked Proximal Policy Optimization deep reinforcement learning approach significantly outperforms Greedy heuristics and Monte Carlo Tree Search in mission efficiency and computational speed.
This paper presents a unified charge-dependent solar modulation model that successfully describes time-resolved AMS-02 proton and antiproton fluxes during solar minimum by solving the 3D Parker transport equation with realistic drift effects and utilizing neural-network surrogates for efficient parameter fitting.