SAN ANTONIO — August 26, 2025 — NASA has launched Surya, its new heliophysics artificial intelligence foundation model to empower solar scientists with tools to enhance research and space weather forecasting. Southwest Research Institute’s Dr. Andrés Muñoz-Jaramillo led a team of scientists from several institutions and universities who played a crucial role in tailoring the scientific data and validating a powerful application to predict solar activity such as coronal mass ejections and other space weather events.

An international team of astronomers, co-led by researchers at University of Galway, has made the unexpected discovery of a new planet.

Detected at an early stage of formation around a young analog of our own Sun, the planet is estimated to be about 5 million years-old and most likely a gas giant of similar size to Jupiter.

On August 8, 2024, the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope captured the sharpest-ever images of a solar flare at the H-alpha wavelength (656.28 nm), revealing dark coronal loop strands in unprecedented detail. The observations, made during the decay phase of an X1.3-class flare, measured loop widths averaging 48.2 km, with some even half as narrow. By using the Inouye Solar Telescope to isolate light at the H-alpha wavelength, emitted by hydrogen atoms, solar physicists can identify fine structures in the lower solar atmosphere too small to observe in the past—offering a potential breakthrough in determining the fundamental scale of coronal loops and advancing solar flare modeling. By improving researchers’ ability to model solar flares, these observations will also improve forecasting for space weather events that are hazardous to satellites, power grids, and communications on Earth.

Liquids can provide some especially tricky challenges for space travelers, but new research could help engineer smarter, more efficient fluid control in zero- and low-gravity environments. 

Scientists have devised a new method for mapping the spottiness of distant stars by using observations from NASA missions of orbiting planets crossing their stars’ faces. The model builds on a technique researchers have used for decades to study star spots. By improving astronomers’ understanding of spotty stars, the new model — called StarryStarryProcess — can help discover more about planetary atmospheres and potential habitability using data from telescopes like NASA’s upcoming Pandora mission.

Key takeaways:

— Astronomers at UC Santa Cruz have developed a new model to better understand “steam worlds,” or water-rich sub-Neptunes – some of the most common planets in the universe.

— These planets are too hot for surface oceans and are thought to have atmospheres consisting of exotic phases of water. They are also 10 to 100 times more massive than the icy moons in our solar system that have historically served as models.

— The James Webb Space Telescope has already detected steam on several sub-Neptunes, and the new models will help scientists interpret what telescopes observe from the atmospheric data collected.

Researchers at Beijing Institute of Technology have experimentally demonstrated anomalous topological pumping in hyperbolic lattices - a phenomenon impossible in conventional materials and Euclidean structures. Published in Science Bulletin, this work reveals how these curved-space structures can simulate high-dimensional quantum physics while exhibiting unique boundary-dependent transport.