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 paper proposes a novel remote-sensing method that utilizes spectral-line polarization induced by ground-state alignment and the Hanle effect to image the strength and orientation of weak interplanetary magnetic fields, overcoming the limitations of traditional in-situ sampling and Faraday rotation.
This paper introduces machine learning surrogates that accurately and efficiently approximate low-thrust trajectory costs and reachability by leveraging a scaling law and a self-similar transformation to generalize across diverse orbital environments without retraining.
This paper introduces a dual formulation for low-thrust trajectory reachability that determines the maximum allowable initial mass for a successful transfer, enabling the construction of efficient, data-driven neural network surrogates to rapidly evaluate mission feasibility without the computational cost of classical forward simulations.
This paper presents the first 2D3V particle-in-cell simulations demonstrating that pre-existing compressive turbulence in nonrelativistic oblique shocks enhances whistler-wave instabilities, resulting in a shorter, hotter electron foreshock and more efficient non-thermal electron acceleration.
This study introduces the C-SWIM framework to quantify the vulnerability of approximately 10,650 US satellites and the resulting macroeconomic losses from a 1-in-100-year solar energetic particle event, estimating that while only about 1% of satellites face critical failure risks, the worst-case scenario could cause up to 95.6% capacity loss in Earth observation services and daily economic impacts reaching $1.3 billion.
This study benchmarks cylindrical blast wave theory against the OSIRIS-REx Sample Return Capsule reentry using 39 infrasound stations, identifying the Sakurai formulation as the most accurate model for predicting signal characteristics of non-ablating hypersonic bodies while demonstrating that the signal period is a robust observable for constraining blast radius.
This paper argues that the apparent convergence of multiple electron temperature diagnostics in weakly collisional plasmas is a structural artifact of a shared ionization bottleneck that measures an effective temperature rather than the core temperature, proposing a new diagnostic taxonomy and a direct method to derive the kappa distribution parameter to resolve long-standing discrepancies in astrophysical and fusion plasmas.
This empirical study of over 24,000 Starlink TLE pairs from April 2026 reveals that position errors follow a power-law growth over time, that high-fidelity propagation using public TLEs generally fails to outperform the standard SGP4 model due to operator-epoch residuals and model alignment biases, and that SGP4 staleness shows a statistically significant but uncalibrated correlation with solar flux at specific altitudes.
This paper demonstrates that the ubiquitous noise observed in solar wind magnetic field data can be explained by the superposition of processes with scale-invariant or lognormal distributions of correlation times, a finding validated through both synthetic time series analysis and decade-long in situ measurements from the ACE spacecraft.
Using Parker Solar Probe observations near the Sun, this study identifies small-scale magnetic flux ropes embedded within reconnection exhausts at the center of heliospheric current sheets, attributing their formation to secondary reconnection and highlighting that their detection is most feasible in regions of weak background magnetic fields.