Tech
Hubble captures a stunning cradle of stars in neighboring galaxy
A new snapshot of a busy star cluster from the Hubble Space Telescope proves the legendary observatory's still got it, even in the golden age of the James Webb Space Telescope.
The image shows the most detailed view of NGC 346 yet, a stellar nursery within the Small Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy that orbits the Milky Way some 210,000 light-years away in the constellation Tucana. Though the cluster has been observed in the past, this is the first time data from all three light wavelengths — infrared, visible, and ultraviolet — have been combined in one picture. The result is a spectacular portrait of how stars form and influence their surroundings in space.
But this glowing cradle of newborn stars also gives astronomers clues about what our universe may have looked like when it was a young whippersnapper.
"The Small Magellanic Cloud is less rich in elements heavier than helium," according to the European Space Agency, which owns and operates Hubble with NASA. "This makes conditions in the galaxy similar to what existed in the early universe."
Credit: NASA
The cluster, full of more than 2,500 newborn stars that blaze blue in the Hubble image, is in a galaxy with far fewer heavy chemical substances than the Milky Way. It's mostly made of hydrogen and helium. Because of this, scientists have used it as a case study for what star formation might have looked like billions of years ago.
The cores of stars are considered element factories: They make carbon, for instance, the same chemical on which humans and much of life on Earth are based. Then, through supernova explosions, they spread these heavier elements, like calcium found in bones and iron in blood, across interstellar space. This dispersal seeds new generations of stars and planets.
Given that most of the chemicals in the universe are thought to have come from exploded stars, scientists have rationalized that the firstborn must have been composed almost entirely of hydrogen and helium, the primitive material that emerged from the Big Bang. Over time, as stars died and scattered heavier elements, subsequent generations of stars formed with more diverse and complex ingredients.
Surrounding the cluster in the Hubble image is a glowing pink cloud called a nebula, where hot, young stars give off ultraviolet light that illuminates the surrounding hydrogen gas. These bright areas are short-lived — only shining as long as the gigundo stars that power them. Astronomers say the big stars only last a few million years, a mere blip in the 13.8 billion years of the universe.
Snakelike dark clouds of thick dust are what's left of the original star-making material that hasn't been pushed away yet by growing stars. The massive stars, many times larger than the sun, are able to do this with intense radiation and powerful stellar winds — streams of charged particles — that clear empty bubbles of space.
Scientists recently used Webb, Hubble's powerful infrared counterpart, to survey 10 stars in the same cluster. They discovered that, even at the stars' relatively old ages, they still maintained substantial disks, the clouds of gas and dust surrounding them that can eventually coalesce to form baby worlds.
Previous thinking was that these primitive stars would have lost their lightweight disks pretty quickly, said study leader Guido De Marchi, after just two or three million years.
"This also implies that planets have more time to form and grow around these stars," De Marchi said.
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It seems OpenAI has been caught with its hands in the proverbial cookie jar. Anthropic has reportedly cut off OpenAI’s access to Anthropic’s APIs over what Anthropic is calling a terms of service breach.
As reported by Wired, multiple sources claim that OpenAI has been cut off from Anthropic’s APIs. Allegedly, OpenAI was using Anthropic’s Claude Code to assist in creating and testing OpenAI’s upcoming GPT-5, which is due to release in August.
According to these sources, OpenAI was plugging into Claude’s internal tools instead of using the chat interface. From there, they used the API to run tests against GPT-5 to check things like coding and creative writing against Claude to compare performance. OpenAI allegedly also tested safety prompts related to things like CSAM, self-harm, and defamation. This would give OpenAI data that it could then use to fine-tune GPT-5 to make it more competitive against Claude.
Unfortunately for OpenAI, this violates Anthropic’s commercial terms of service, which ban companies from using Anthropic’s tools to build competitor AI products.
“Customer may not and must not attempt to access the Services to build a competing product or service, including to train competing AI models or resell the Services except as expressly approved by Anthropic,” the terms read.
OpenAI responded by saying that what the company was doing was an industry standard, as all the AI companies test their models against the competing models. The company then went on to say that it respected Anthropic’s decision but expressed disappointment in having its API access shut off, especially considering that Anthropic’s access to OpenAI’s API remains open.
A spokesperson told Wired that OpenAI’s access would be reinstated for “benchmarking and safety evaluations.”
It’s not the first time this year that Anthropic has cut off API access. In June, the company cut off Windsurf’s API access after rumors that it was being sold to OpenAI. That deal ultimately fell through, but Anthropic’s cofounder, Jared Kaplan, told TechCrunch at the time that “it would be odd for us to be selling Claude to OpenAI.”
Anthropic has also tweaked its rate limits for Claude, which will take effect in late August, with one of the reasons being that a small number of users are violating the company’s policy by sharing and reselling accounts.
Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.
It’s the end of another quarter, which means it’s time for yet another earnings call with concerning ideas for generating more revenue. This time around, it's Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, who told shareholders on Thursday that there’s “significant financial opportunity” in delivering ads through Alexa+, the company’s new AI-powered voice assistant.
“I think over time, there will be opportunities, you know, as people are engaging in more multi-turn conversations to have advertising play a role — to help people find discovery and also as a lever to drive revenue,” Jassy said, per the investor call transcript.
Since launching earlier this year, Alexa+ has reportedly reached millions of users. Unlike the original Alexa, which mostly turns off lights and sets timers, Alexa+ is designed to be more conversational, context-aware, and AI-driven. It can help you plan your date night, entertain your kids, and even dabble in basic image and video generation — all under the banner of your $14.99/month Prime subscription.
But so far, Amazon Alexa has been an ad-free experience. It's also more than 10 years old, and it doesn't make money; thus, it's been deemed a "colossal failure" by those within the company.
Of course, Amazon isn’t alone in trying to figure out how to make AI pay for itself. Both Google and OpenAI have explored ad integration in their AI products as a way to generate revenue. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, in particular, has made a notable pivot: once firmly against advertising in his chatbot, he’s since reversed course, possibly opening the door for ads in future versions of ChatGPT.
Whatever the motivation, injecting ads into Alexa+ would mark a major shift in both user experience and Amazon’s strategy, especially given the assistant’s long history of being expensive to maintain and hard to monetize. Ad-supported Alexa+ could be Amazon’s attempt to finally turn its once-money-burning smart assistant into a revenue machine, without hiking the subscription fee (at least for now).
Alexa+ is still new, and what an ad-supported experience would actually look like remains unclear. According to Jassy, the idea is to frame ads as helpful, something to assist customers in discovering products they might be interested in buying.
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