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 expository article provides a unified, self-contained, and didactic introduction to Lambert's problem in orbital dynamics, offering a comprehensive derivation for elliptical trajectories that requires only minimal background knowledge and serves as an accelerated resource for students and researchers.
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.
This study utilizes Parker Solar Probe observations from Encounters 1 through 24 to characterize the radial evolution of near-Sun solar wind plasma and magnetic field properties, revealing distinct temperature behaviors and fluctuation patterns that suggest wave-particle interactions drive proton beam generation and heating.
This paper analyzes five years of ground-based GNSS and two years of space-based FORMOSAT-7/COSMIC-2 data from Sharjah to demonstrate that ionospheric scintillation risk for Direct-to-Cellular communications is highest at low frequencies during equinoxes between 20:00–22:00 local time, with higher frequency bands showing significantly greater robustness.
This paper proposes that local magnetic mirror traps, rather than the Sun's global electrostatic potential alone, explain the observed sunward electron deficit, suggesting the solar wind's core population forms through electron capture by these moving traps and that the Sun's true accelerating potential is significantly deeper than previously inferred from cutoff energy data.
Using Bayesian inference on data from the Chang'e-6 lander's NILS instrument, this study presents a novel semi-analytical model that quantifies the scattering and sputtering of solar wind ions on the lunar surface, revealing specific probabilities for negative ion emission, surface roughness effects on angular distributions, and a surface binding energy of 5.5 eV.
This study demonstrates that data-driven 2D fully kinetic simulations initialized with MMS mission parameters successfully reproduce the overall shape of ion and electron energy distributions during magnetotail magnetic reconnection, though they tend to underestimate the high-energy electron tail, highlighting the critical influence of initial upstream temperatures and the need for 3D models to fully capture observed particle energization.
This paper highlights how inconsistent definitions and implementations of coordinate system acronyms in space physics hinder reproducibility and proposes a set of recommendations—including standardized definitions, a citable reference database, centralized SPICE kernel maintenance, and explicit software documentation—to resolve these discrepancies.
This study utilizes Direct Simulation Monte Carlo and view-factor methods to simulate airlock venting and module outgassing, determining that scientific measurements of lunar atmospheric species like 40Ar and water vapor must be conducted at distances ranging from 30–100 meters to over 3 kilometers to avoid contamination from human activities.
This paper argues that the traditional first-order Fermi acceleration mechanism is physically inconsistent and should be replaced by the ballistic surfing acceleration (BSA) model, which correctly attributes cosmic ray spectral indices to magnetic field compression and accurately reproduces observed spectra and acceleration timescales in supernova shocks.