SAN ANTONIO — June 3, 2025 — New research led by a Southwest Research Institute scientist identified a new source of energetic particles near the Sun. These definitive observations were made by instruments aboard NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, which detected the powerful phenomena as the spacecraft dipped in and out of the solar corona.

Black holes could serve as cheaper, natural alternatives to expensive facilities searching for dark matter and similarly elusive particles that hold clues to the universe’s deepest secrets. 

In a groundbreaking new study, a team led by scientists from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) National Solar Observatory (NSO) has captured the sharpest-ever view of the Sun’s surface, revealing ultra-fine magnetic “stripes,” known as striations, just 20 kilometers wide—roughly the length of Manhattan. Using the NSF Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, built and operated by the NSO, the team observed these bright and dark striations rippling across the walls of solar granules, caused by curtain-like magnetic fields that modify light much like fabric fluttering in the wind. The discovery uncovers a new layer of complexity in the Sun’s magnetic structure and demonstrates the Inouye Solar Telescope’s unmatched ability to resolve features previously thought beyond reach—offering new clues to how magnetism shapes solar phenomena.

A research team from Institute of Modern Physics (IMP), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has announced an ambitious scientific plan to construct a "Super η Factory" in Huizhou, Guangdong province, China. This facility will utilize high-intensity proton beams to produce over 10¹³ η mesons annually, offering an unparalleled platform for probing dark portal particles, matter-antimatter asymmetry, and other frontier questions in physics

An international research team led by the Yunnan Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), along with collaborators, has achieved a breakthrough by using the Transit Timing Variation (TTV) technique for the first time to discover a super-Earth. The exoplanet, Kepler-725c, has 10 times the mass of Earth and is located in the habitable zone of the Sun-like star Kepler-725. The discovery was published in Nature Astronomy.

Research team used ProteinMPNN to expand the sequence space of synthetic binding proteins (SBPs), improving their solubility and stability, and showed ProteinMPNN-designed proteins outperform classical methods.