SAN ANTONIO — August 5, 2026 — A new study led by Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) provides evidence that liquid nitrogen is rising to Pluto’s surface through cracks in the northern edge of the Sputnik Planitia, part of the massive heart-shaped glacier on the dwarf planet’s surface. This is the first evidence of liquid recently flowing on Pluto. The study is based on data from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft and is led by SwRI Associate Vice President Dr. Alan Stern, the principal investigator of the New Horizons mission.

The occurrence of fires in the Arctic is linked not only to warming temperatures and increasingly dry conditions, but also human activity in the region. An international research team led by the University of Zurich found that fires occurred 2.5 times more often in lit areas associated with human activity than in climatically similar unlit areas. Effective fire prevention and response can help reduce risks whose impacts extend far beyond the Arctic.

Physicists at the University of Würzburg and the Würzburg-Dresden Cluster of Excellence ctd.qmat have realized the world’s first continuously operating maser based on the semiconductor silicon carbide. This new technology could pave the way for compact microwave sources, low-noise amplifiers, and highly sensitive magnetic field sensors – and may even find future applications in space technology.

An international team of researchers has succeeded in producing atomic quantum gas mixtures with an unprecedented particle flux. In the journal Nature Communications, the scientists report on experiments conducted with the MAIUS-B apparatus, in which Bose-Einstein condensates consisting of two different atomic species – rubidium and potassium – were generated and studied under microgravity conditions in the Einstein Elevator at Leibniz University Hannover, Germany. A key contribution to this achievement came from a technological development at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz: the highly sophisticated and compact optical system used to control the atoms.

In hub-filament systems, radially converging filaments are known to channel dense gas into hubs where massive stars form, but the contribution of inter-filamentary diffuse gas has remained unclear. In this study, researchers mapped gas motions in the Monoceros R2 star-forming region using carbon monoxide observations. They found that diffuse inter-filamentary gas not only flows directly toward the central hub but also replenishes dense filaments, substantially increasing the total gas reservoir available for massive star formation.

Kyoto, Japan -- Dark matter's existence is all but certain -- astronomers believe it makes up about a quarter of the universe's total energy content -- yet its true identity has eluded us for decades. Two of the leading candidates for dark matter are the hypothetical particles ultralight axions and dark photons, which in the range studied here would be some 19 to 21 orders of magnitude lighter than the electron.

Conventional axion searches tend to involve converting them into photons with the help of strong laboratory magnets. However, research in a laboratory inherently limits the space over which such a field can be applied. A collaborative team of researchers from Kyoto University, Hiroshima University, and Nihon University realized that, by contrast, Earth's own magnetic field spans a scale no laboratory could match.

"We asked ourselves whether we could use the Earth itself as a giant detector in the search," says corresponding author Atsushi Taruya. "The Earth-ionosphere cavity acts as a natural resonator that amplifies electromagnetic waves right around the mass range we wanted to probe."

SAN ANTONIO — August 4, 2026 — A Southwest Research Institute-led paper documents how NASA’s Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere mission could greatly improve the ability to forecast the arrival of coronal mass ejections (CMEs). These vast clouds of magnetized plasma can disrupt satellites, power grids and communications when they strike Earth.