A paper led by Gaku Kinoshita, a first-year PhD student at Yoshioka Laboratory, and co-authored by Associate Professor Kazuo Yoshioka, as well as an international team including researchers from the University of Leicester (UK), Nagoya University, and the European Space Agency (ESA), has been published in The Astrophysical Journal, a journal of the American Astronomical Society.

Using data from multiple spacecraft, including the Mercury explorer BepiColombo and the solar observatory Solar Orbiter, the study performs a multipoint comparison of an interplanetary coronal mass ejection (ICME) and the associated cosmic-ray variations. This analysis reveals how the ICME evolved in both the radial and longitudinal directions within the heliosphere. Understanding the propagation processes of solar plasma is critically important for protecting ground-based infrastructure, and this research contributes to improving the accuracy of space weather forecasting.

Press release from the Graduate School of Science, The University of Tokyo:
“The path to solar weather forecasts. Space-based measurements of solar eruptions are the first of their kind.”
https://www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/focus/en/press/z0508_00436.html

Paper information:
Gaku Kinoshita, Beatriz Sanchez-Cano, Yoshizumi Miyoshi, Laura Rodríguez-García, Emilia Kilpua, Benoit Lavraud, Mathias Rojo, Marco Pinto, Yuki Harada, Go Murakami, Yoshifumi Saito, Shoichiro Yokota, Daniel Heyner, David Fischer, Nicolas André, and Kazuo Yoshioka (2026),
“Spatiotemporal Evolution of the 2022 March Interplanetary Coronal Mass Ejection Revealed by Multipoint Observations of Forbush Decreases,”
The Astrophysical Journal, 997(2),
https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/ae1834