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 utilizes Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) observations to characterize a sub-Alfvénic magnetic cloud within an April 2023 Coronal Mass Ejection, revealing distinct electron heating features and weak magnetohydrodynamic turbulence with magnetospheric-like properties that differ significantly from the surrounding super-Alfvénic solar wind.
This study utilizes Juno UVS observations of Ganymede's UV aurora to constrain electron-impact ionization rates of its O atmosphere, revealing that these rates significantly exceed photoionization and drive substantial ionospheric outflow and surface ice erosion.
This paper presents a robust empirical law derived from 25 years of NASA ACE observations that links solar wind bulk-flow speed to magnetohydrodynamic-scale turbulence energy, offering a practical method to estimate turbulence levels from low-resolution speed data for applications in space weather forecasting and particle transport modeling.
This study uses hybrid-kinetic simulations to demonstrate how ion pickup at outer planet moons drives electromagnetic and compressional waves that rapidly scatter and thermalize newly ionized particles, providing a kinetic framework for interpreting in situ spacecraft observations of wave-particle interactions in the outer solar system.
This study analyzes helioseismic p-mode frequency shifts from GONG data across solar cycles 23, 24, and the ascending phase of 25 to reveal that quasi-biennial oscillations exhibit weak latitudinal dependence with nearly constant ~3-year periods at high latitudes, amplitudes that scale with magnetic activity and mode frequency, and a partial decoupling from the solar cycle strength as evidenced by differing amplitude-to-cycle ratios and slopes between cycles.
This paper investigates the interaction of strong electromagnetic waves with unmagnetized pair plasmas, demonstrating that the process is governed by a single nonlinearity parameter which determines whether the wave acts as a relativistic piston driving a shock, with implications for neutron star radio pulses and future laser experiments.
Using multi-spacecraft observations, this study characterizes compressible fluctuations in solar wind turbulence, revealing that while slow magnetosonic modes dominate the compressible energy budget and explain observed dependencies on plasma beta and radial distance, a significant correlated (fast mode-like) component remains unexplained by current linear or nonlinear theories.
This paper utilizes an unsupervised machine learning framework combining Principal Component Analysis and K-Means clustering on MAVEN spacecraft data to identify and characterize distinct slow, fast, intermediate, and compressed solar wind regimes at Mars, revealing their modulation by solar activity across Cycles 24 and 25.
This paper proposes a distributed compute architecture for Sun-Synchronous Orbit satellites that integrates solar, compute, and radiator functions into small panels to achieve high specific power and thermal efficiency, enabling a single Starship-launched satellite to deliver over 100 kW of compute power per metric ton and support thousands of simultaneous large language model inferences.
This study demonstrates that chromospheric turbulence acts as a critical regulator of stellar wind mass flux by dissipating wave energy, and that suppressing this turbulence in simulations successfully reproduces observed scaling laws between magnetic field strength and mass loss without requiring additional energy mechanisms.