Related papers: Solar Wind at 33 AU: Setting Bounds on the Pluto I…

The New Horizons flyby of Pluto confirmed the existence of hazes in its atmosphere. Observations of a large high- to low- phase brightness ratio, combined with the blue color of the haze, suggest that the haze particles are fractal…

Solar wind turbulence is a dynamical phenomenon that evolves with heliocentric distance. Orbiting Mars since September 2014, Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) offers a unique opportunity to explore some of its main properties…

Combining stellar occultation observations probing Pluto's atmosphere from 1988 to 2013 and models of energy balance between Pluto's surface and atmosphere, we conclude that Pluto's atmosphere does not collapse at any point in its 248-year…

The New Horizons ALICE instrument is a lightweight (4.4 kg), low-power (4.4 Watt) imaging spectrograph aboard the New Horizons mission to Pluto/Charon and the Kuiper Belt. Its primary job is to determine the relative abundances of various…

We use magnetograms of 8 solar analogues of ages 30~Myr to 3.6~Gyr obtained from Zeeman Doppler Imaging (ZDI) and taken from the literature, together with two solar magnetograms, to drive magnetohydrodynamical (MHD) wind simulations and…

The extreme temperatures and non-thermal nature of the solar corona and solar wind arise from an unidentified physical mechanism that preferentially heats certain ion species relative to others. Spectroscopic indicators of unequal…

The inverse square law of gravity is poorly probed by experimental tests at distances of ~ 10 AUs. Recent analysis of the trajectory of the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft have shown an unmodeled acceleration directed toward the Sun which was…

Using data collected by the Indian Mars Orbiter Mission in October 2021, we investigated coronal regions of the Sun by analyzing the Doppler spectral width of radio signals to estimate solar wind velocity. A simplified equation is…

On July 14th 2015, NASA's New Horizons mission gave us an unprecedented detailed view of the Pluto system. The complex compositional diversity of Pluto's encounter hemisphere was revealed by the Ralph/LEISA infrared spectrometer on board of…

The aim of this study is to analyze the Earth habitability with respect to the direct exposition of the Earth atmosphere to the solar wind along the Suns evolution on the main sequence including the realistic evolution of the space weather…

A central problem of space plasma physics is how protons and electrons are heated in a turbulent, magnetized plasma. The differential heating of charged species due to dissipation of turbulent fluctuations plays a key role in solar wind…

High-mass microquasar jets, produced in an accreting compact object in orbit around a massive star, must cross a region filled with stellar wind. The combined effects of the wind and orbital motion can strongly affect the jet properties on…

The Solar Orbiter mission, to be launched in July 2017, will carry a suite of remote sensing and in-situ instruments, including the Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager (PHI). PHI will deliver high-cadence images of the Sun in intensity and…

The shapes of fluid planets bear the signatures of rotational flattening and atmospheric flows. Precise knowledge of their shapes and wind profiles may therefore reveal their interior rotation rates. We re-examine this idea for the ice…

Action of solar wind on arbitrarily shaped interplanetary dust particle is investigated. The final relativistically covariant equation of motion of the particle contains both orbital evolution and change of particle's mass. Non-radial solar…

Parker Solar Probe (PSP) observations during its first encounter at 35.7 $R_\odot$ have shown the presence of magnetic field lines which are strongly perturbed to the point that they produce local inversions of the radial magnetic field,…

Although the interplanetary magnetic field variability has been extensively investigated in situ by means of data coming from several space missions, the newly launched missions providing high-resolution measures and approaching the Sun,…

Parker Solar Probe (PSP) achieved its first orbit perihelion on November 6, 2018, reaching a heliocentric distance of about 0.165 au (35.55 R$_\odot$). Here, we study the evolution of fully developed turbulence associated with the slow…

Here, we study the dichotomy of the escaping atmosphere of the newly discovered close-in exoplanet AU Mic b. On one hand, the high EUV stellar flux is expected to cause a strong atmospheric escape in AU Mic b. On the other hand, the wind of…

Owing to the ever-present solar wind, our vast solar system is full of plasmas. The turbulent solar wind, together with sporadic solar eruptions, introduces various space plasma processes and phenomena in the solar atmosphere all the way to…