Hubble Space Telescope discovers the earliest star

by time news

Wf stars have names and not just numbers, they are usually close – astronomically speaking. Betelgeuse in Orion or Antares in Scorpio are roughly 600 light years away from us and thus still deep inside our Milky Way. This is especially true for Aldebaran in the constellation Taurus with 65 light years and Sirius, the brightest fixed star in our sky, with a distance of less than nine light years.

However, the star Earendel, whose discovery was published in the current issue of by a team of astronomers led by Brian Welch and Dan Coe from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore Nature report is so far away that the light that the researchers caught from it with the Hubble Space Telescope traveled an unbelievable 12.9 billion years to reach us. It was emitted when the Big Bang was just 900 million years old and the universe was only seven percent of its current age – at the dawn of the cosmos, so to speak. Hence the name, which is taken from an Old English Advent poem from the early Middle Ages and is not coincidentally reminiscent of the mythical half-Elf Eärendil from JRR Tolkien’s “Silmarillion”, who wears the morning star as a jewel on his forehead.

A comparatively normal object

Over a period of 12.9 billion years, the light from a source that shines in all directions has become very rarefied. Normally, astronomers, even with their biggest and best telescopes, have a hard time seeing entire galaxies from such a distance, whose images combine the light of hundreds of billions of individual stars. And when objects below the caliber of entire galaxies sometimes make themselves noticeable from such enormous distances, then there are absolutely extreme processes behind them, in which masses of matter fall into supermassive black holes and parts of them are bundled along the axes of their vortex movement and accelerated to almost the speed of light.


In service for a good thirty years, the Hubble Space Telescope will soon be replaced by its successor, the James Webb Telescope.
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Image: dpa

But Earendel is apparently a comparatively normal star, albeit a very fat one. The authors estimate that it should have at least fifty times the mass of our sun Nature-Article, and shine a million times more intensely. Such stars are rare – the vast majority of stars in the universe are smaller than our sun – but not uncommon, and such hums are not actually seen over intergalactic distances of this dimension. In this case, however, the researchers were helped by a coincidence.

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