Technologies

A ‘Messy’ Star Death: How an Early Muse of NASA’s Webb Telescope Came to Be

The Southern Ring Nebula, brought to you by a star’s explosive demise.

When NASA released the James Webb Space Telescope’s very first images this year, astronomers and space-lovers all over the world were met with a menagerie of blurred galaxies from near the beginning of time, coffee-hued dust clouds brimming with wonderful secrets and incandescent realms fit for Disney princess castles. It was a glorious moment for humankind, witnessing how stars can unite us beneath our layers of division.

But among this trailblazing telescope’s first five images, one especially stood out not only for its beauty but also for its mystery — a striking portrait of the Southern Ring Nebula hid an important history yet to be known. Simply, scientists wanted to learn what, exactly, caused this intricate, amoeba-shaped, ancient star explosion aftermath to exist?

Et, voila.

On Thursday, an international team of nearly 70 astronomers used the JWST’s stunning image to deduce the Southern Ring Nebula’s backstory.

Details are published in the journal Nature Astronomy, but basically, what they found is that some 2,500 years ago, a star nearly three times the size of our sun died at about 500 million years of age.

When it died, they say, the stellar body ejected most of its mass into surrounding space, forming shrouds of gas that slowly expanded with time until they turned into the complex folds we see today in the JWST’s Southern Ring Nebula structure.

Then, when all was said and done, the deceased star left behind a sort of corpse, or white dwarf star, with about half the mass of our sun but around the size of Earth. (That’s super dense, to be clear).

Plus, as an added surprise, the astronomers also found evidence of two or three companion stars they believe hastened the blown up star’s death — as well an «innocent bystander» star that might’ve just gotten caught up in the mix.

«When we first saw the images, we knew we had to do something, we must investigate!» Orsola De Marco, lead author of the paper and astrophysicist at Macquarie University, said in a statement. «The community came together, and from this one image of a randomly chosen nebula, we were able to discern much more precise structures than ever before. The promise of the James Webb Space Telescope is incredible.»

That Southern Ring Nebula image really is something

Even back in July, the JWST’s Southern Ring Nebula rendition had raised eyebrows during its reveal. I mean, at the top left of one version of the JWST’s view, taken with the Mid-Infrared instrument, a weird bluish line ended up literally being a galaxy photobomber.

«I made a bet that said, ‘It’s part of the nebula,'» NASA astronomer Karl Gordon recounted during the unveiling. «I lost the bet, because then we looked more carefully at both Nircam and MIRI images, and it’s very clearly an edge-on galaxy.»

We were also able to see not one but two stars dance around one another at the marvel’s center for the first time, stirring the pot of gas and dust to create the ornate patterns that make the image perfect as an iPhone background. (Yes, one of these is the white dwarf that De Marco and fellow scientists discuss in their latest paper.)

«This star is now small and hot but is surrounded by cool dust,» Joel Kastner, another team member from the Rochester Institute of Technology, said in a statement. «We think all that gas and dust we see thrown all over the place must have come from that one star, but it was tossed in very specific directions by the companion stars.»

The other star visible in the JWST’s photo, according to the team, is just one of the companion stars that orbits the central star while the latter loses mass over time.

However, as to why the team believes there aren’t just two stars at play here but rather three, four – maybe more – that’s because of how a series of spiral structures seem to be moving out from the center, generating arches, and how a 3D view of the nebula’s data points to irregular jets of matter shooting from the phenomenon’s center.

«We first inferred the presence of a close companion because of the dusty disk around the central star, the further partner that created the arches and the super far companion that you can see in the image,» De Marco said. «Once we saw the jets, we knew there had to be another star or even two involved at the center, so we believe there are one or two very close companions, an additional one at middle distance and one very far away.

«If this is the case, there are four or even five objects involved in this messy death.»

Technologies

You Can Now Buy a Ford From Your Local Dealer Through Amazon

If you hate car shopping in person, you may be happy to hear that you can now buy a preowned Ford through Amazon.

Technologies

Cloudflare Outage Hits Hard Across the Web, but Recovery Is in Progress

When web services provider Cloudflare went down on Tuesday, a significant portion of the internet became unavailable.

Web services provider Cloudflare got hit by an outage on Tuesday, disrupting access to many websites and services including OpenAI, Spotify, X, Grindr, Letterboxd and Canva.

Cloudflare is a cloud services and cybersecurity company based in San Francisco that is used by approximately 20% of all websites, according to W3Techs. It’s one of a handful of services, along with Amazon Web Services, CrowdStrike and Fastly (all of which have experienced major outages in the past few years) that you might never have heard of, but that provide essential internet infrastructure.

The bulk of sites and services impacted by Tuesday’s outage, which began around 3.30 a.m. PT, seemed to recover within three hours of Cloudflare going down. It’s likely that some continue to be affected, and may still experience difficulties throughout the day. At the time of writing, Cloudflare was still issuing updates about the incident to its system status page.

Cloudflare hasn’t yet said what caused the outage, but has promised to conduct a full investigation.

Which sites and services were impacted?

Cloudflare has a massive range of clients across the internet, ranging from websites that are household names to smaller services you might not have heard of. Due to its size, when it went down, it took many of those sites and services with it.

Among those affected by the outage was Downdetector, which is where most people go to report problems when services are offline. (Downdetector is owned by the same parent company as CNET, Ziff Davis.)

Now that it’s back up and running, Downdetector says that it received over 2.1 million reports during the outage period. Over 435,000 of these came from the US, with the UK, Japan and Germany appearing to be the countries that were next most affected.

Most of the reports pertained to Cloudflare, but other affected companies also received a significant number of reports. They include X (320,549 reports), League of Legends (130,260 reports), OpenAI (81,077 reports), Spotify (93,377 reports) and Grindr (25,031 reports).

How did the outage unfold?

Cloudflare first acknowledged the outage at 3.48 a.m. PT. The company issued a statement on its system status page saying that it was aware of the problem.

«Cloudflare is aware of, and investigating an issue which impacts multiple customers: Widespread 500 errors, Cloudflare Dashboard and API also failing,» it said. «We are working to understand the full impact and mitigate this problem. More updates to follow shortly.»

At 5.09 a.m. PT, the company said the issue had been identified and a fix was being implemented. In the subsequent hours, errors began to drop and services gradually came back online.

Cloudflare added at 9.14 a.m. PT that most services had returned to normal. «A full post-incident investigation and details about the incident will be made available asap,» it said.

Is the internet stable and reliable?

The Cloudflare outage comes just one month after Amazon Web Services went down, causing havoc across the internet. The AWS outage affected sites including Reddit, Snapchat, Roblox and Fortnite, sparking many to ask whether having such huge swathes of the internet reliant on a few centralized services is sensible or safe.

Major outages are also highlighting concerns about our growing reliance on AI — in particular the fragility of the infrastructure AI relies upon to function every day.

«The most dominant platform did not buckle because of simultaneous queries or the release of a new competitive model, but because of a problem with Cloudflare, a web security and performance provider,» said Sarah Kreps, director of the Tech Policy Institute at Cornell University. «The issue exposes the reality that this multi-billion, even trillion dollar investment in AI is only as reliable as its least scrutinized third party infrastructure.»

Technologies

Google Says New Gemini 3 AI Model Is Its Most Capable Yet

Gemini 3 is available to all users in the Gemini app, along with powering AI Mode in Google Search.

Gemini 3, the latest AI model from Google, is the company’s most intelligent model to date, with more advanced multimodal and vibe coding capabilities, the company said in a blog post on Tuesday. It’s available now.

Google says Gemini 3 is «built to grasp depth and nuance» and is better at understanding the intent behind a user’s request. The company also touted Gemini 3’s multimodal capabilities, such as its ability to turn a long video lecture into interactive flash cards or to analyze a person’s pickleball match and find areas for improvement.

Gemini 3 isn’t limited to the app. It’ll also be available in AI Mode in Search and, for Pro and Ultra subscribers, in AI Overviews. In AI Overviews, Gemini 3 can generate interactive elements.

Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis and Koray Kavukcuoglu said in a blog post that Gemini 3 Pro is less sycophantic, a problem that’s been plaguing AIs and leading to AI psychosis in some. It’s also more secure against prompt injection attacks, in which bad actors try to make an AI ignore its original instructions and perform unintended actions.

The company also unveiled Google Antigravity, a new agentic development platform. Google says Antigravity is like having an active partner while making tools or working on projects, autonomously planning and executing complex software tasks while validating its own code. It works in tandem with Gemini 2.5’s Computer Use model for browser control and works with nano banana, Gemini 2.5’s image model.

Gemini 3’s new, more powerful, agentic capabilities will only be available to $250/month Google AI Ultra subscribers at first. This will allow the Gemini Agent to do multi-step workflows, like planning a travel itinerary.

Read more: AI Essentials: 29 Ways You Can Make Gen AI Work for You, According to Our Experts

Google’s release of Gemini 3 comes as an AI war is heating up between it, OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI. Google’s consistently been leading AI leaderboards, although other AI models haven’t been far behind, sometimes trading spots at the top. With the release of Gemini 3, Google seems to be trying to solve for some of AI’s more annoying problems, like hallucinations or sycophancy. It’s also trying to prove that AIs can be truly agentic, being able to accomplish tasks on the user’s behalf. Other agentic models have proven to be problematic in real-world usage and run into various security concerns, especially in web browsers.

The latest AI release from Google also comes at a time when there are fears of an AI bubble forming in the stock market. AI companies, including Nvidia, Google, Meta and Microsoft, account for 30% of the S&P 500. Google currently has a valuation of $3.4 trillion. Even Google CEO Sundar Pichai says the trillion-dollar AI investment boom has «elements of irrationality» and that a burst would affect every AI company, in an interview with the BBC. Still, if Google is to keep its stock price moving upward, it needs to demonstrate that its AI models beat the competition.