Published on: 07/08/2022 (last update: 07/08/2022 time: 10:16)
Together – NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has captured an image of the most distant known star in the universe, Earendel, about 28 billion light-years away from Earth.
And that’s more than 10 billion light-years away from the most distant star astronomers have seen.
At such great distances, experts can usually only observe entire galaxies, but a lucky coincidence allowed them to spot Earendel with the Hubble Space Telescope and then observe it again with Webb on July 30.
By comparing the Hubble image to the image captured by NASA’s new $10 billion Super Space Telescope, experts were able to find the Earendel as a faint red dot beneath a group of distant galaxies.
He described the star, whose light took 12.9 billion light-years to reach Earth, as so faint that it would be difficult to find without the help of Hubble – which imaged in ultraviolet visible light compared to Webb’s infrared light.
Experts said the star is visible because it aligns perfectly with the galaxy cluster to provide the maximum possible magnification.
“This is a really lucky alignment,” said Dan Ko, of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Maryland. “No one has ever seen a star this big, let alone a galaxy.”
Because light takes time to travel, this new Webb image shows Earendel as it was about 900 million years after the Big Bang.