It only takes climbing some stairs to be constantly reminded that gravity plays a strong role in our life. Some years ago a new conjecture proposed that Galactic Cosmic Rays, bound by gravity and magnetic fields in space, would also play a strong role in our life trough changes in the Earth Climate.
It all boils down to clouds and their very strong influence on the way Earth reflect solar radiation. The amount of clouds in the atmosphere constitute the largest unknown in the present models of Climate Change (see UN IPCC report).
Water vapor saturated air masses do not bring clouds since water cannot condensate in arbitrarily small droplets due to the increase in the surface tension energy. Small conglomerates of molecules (aerosols), formed from inorganic and organic compounds, are necessary to grow droplet and form clouds. The fact that the growth rate of these aerosols can be dependent of ions and free electrons in the atmosphere, generated by ionization induced by galactic cosmic rays, is being extensively studied by the CLOUD collaboration at CERN, with the collaboration of the CENTRA team.
Flowing from a long sequence of high impact results, we have again published two papers in science, one that is particularly concerned with ionization induced by cosmic rays and, indirectly, with space and gravity.
Kirkby , J. et al., including A. Amorim (CENTRA), A. Dias (CENTRA), A. Tomé (IDL), Ion-induced nucleation of pure biogenic particles, Nature 533, 521–526 (26 May 2016).
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v533/n7604/full/nature17953.html and also http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v533/n7604/full/nature18271.html
The CLOUD collaboration, including the Portuguese CENTRA team, is investigating the effect of cosmic rays as well as with being the world leader in aerosol formation studies in a large ultra-clean chamber that simulates the Earth atmosphere.
See videos: https://cds.cern.ch/record/2155289 and https://cds.cern.ch/record/2154271
