[The Epoch Times, April 1, 2022](The Epoch Times reporter Di Rui compiled and reported) The Hubble Space Telescope has set a new landmark observational record: the detection of starlight from the most distant universe to date. This ray of light traveled through the universe for 12.9 billion years before reaching the Hubble telescope.
The findings were announced in a study published March 30 in the journal Nature. Scientists believe that this ray of light came from a star that is 50 to 100 times the mass of the sun and a million times brighter.
Brian Welch, a doctoral student at The Johns Hopkins University, one of the principal investigators, named it “Earendel.” The word comes from Old English and means morning star. The galaxy it is in is called the Sunrise Arc, and Welch felt it was fitting to name the star Morning Star.
Scientists believe the universe has been around 13.8 billion years since the Big Bang, which means the star was born less than a billion years after the Big Bang.
“This is one of the greatest observations in Hubble’s 32-year observational history,” said co-author Rogier Windhorst, an astronomer at Arizona State University. The star is located 4 billion light-years further away than the most distant star ever observed.
Observing starlight from the most distant regions of the universe has been one of the hotspots in recent years, because these signals can reveal much about the early days of the universe and test existing astronomical theories.
But some of the signals are controversial because they come from so far away. For example, some researchers suspect that this signal does not come from a star.
One possibility is from the combined effect of two or three stars; another possibility is that it is a black hole, of course the black hole is invisible, but the huge gravity of the black hole attracts matter to create an accretion disk around it, Also emits bright light.
“There’s a celestial body there,” Windhorst said. “It’s unmistakable. The question is, what kind of celestial body is it?”
In a few months, this signal will be one of its targets for a new generation of more powerful telescopes, the Webb Space Telescope (JWST). ◇#
Responsible editor: Ye Ziwei