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 study presents the first statistical assessment of using STEREO-A as a sub-L1 monitor for geomagnetic storm forecasting, demonstrating that while radial separations up to 0.05 au do not guarantee lead time advantages, a new time-shifting methodology can successfully identify 26 of 47 storms, particularly intense events, despite systematic biases in predicting the timing and strength of geomagnetic minima.
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.
This paper demonstrates that two-fluid simulations employing appropriately chosen Landau-fluid closure parameters can accurately reproduce kinetic-scale energy spectra from fully kinetic Vlasov simulations, even in turbulent regimes far from local thermodynamic equilibrium, thereby validating their use as a computationally efficient alternative for modeling large-scale plasma turbulence.
This paper demonstrates that an analytical model of general relativistic Lense-Thirring precession successfully explains the observed 20-day coprecession of the accretion disk and jet in the tidal disruption event AT2020afhd, yielding a black hole spin estimate of 0.185–0.215 and offering a method to break spin-sign degeneracies by incorporating the hole's quadrupole moment and disk structure.
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 dissertation presents a novel nonlinear model of magnetospheric chorus waves by adapting the free-electron laser framework, deriving a reduced set of equations and a Ginzburg-Landau equation to analyze wave packet behavior, stability, and mode condensation.
This study demonstrates that electron precipitation during space weather events enhances nitric oxide production in the polar thermosphere, which acts as a cooling agent to counteract atmospheric expansion and reduce drag on low Earth orbit satellites, thereby highlighting the need to incorporate precipitation-induced NO production into empirical orbit prediction models.
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 novel probabilistic framework for cislunar orbit determination that overcomes the limitations of Gauss's method in three-body dynamics by combining kinematic fitting of noisy observations for initial state estimation with a Particle Gaussian Mixture Filter for long-term uncertainty reduction.