2023-08-11 15:15:17
Taking the Hubble Space Telescope’s observations of the farthest known star a step further, the James Webb Space Telescope has now observed this fascinating star, located at the far reaches of the universe.
The star is so far away that its light has taken nearly 13 billion years to travel from it to our solar system.
The star is called Earendel and it formed in the first billion years after the Big Bang, the “explosion” with which the universe was created.
Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) instrument has revealed what type of star it is and what its color is. It is a blue giant star of spectral class B, twice as hot as the Sun and approximately one million times more luminous than it.
The star is located in a galaxy that is only detectable due to the combined scrying power of human technology and nature through an effect called gravitational lensing. Both Hubble and Webb were able to detect Earendel due to its lucky alignment behind a ripple in space-time created by the huge galaxy cluster WHL0137-08. This cluster of galaxies, located between us and Earendel, is so massive that it distorts the fabric of space itself, producing a magnifying effect with the result that astronomers can look through the cluster as if it were a magnifying glass.
A star that for a time held the record for the most distant in the universe was detected by Hubble and observed at a distance of approximately 10 billion light-years. The light captured by Hubble from this star left it only about 4 billion years after the Big Bang.
Another research team using Webb and gravitational lensing recently identified a star named Quyllur. This star is a red giant. The light from her captured by the Webb began its cosmic journey towards us some 3,000 million years after the Big Bang.
Earendel. (Image: NASA/ESA/CSA/D. Coe/STScI/AURA/Johns Hopkins University/B. Welch/NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/University of Maryland at College Park (photo). Z. Levay (image processing)
Stars as massive as Earendel often have stellar companions. The astronomers did not expect that the Webb would show any companion to Earendel, since it would be impossible to distinguish between Earendel and his companion, due to their closeness to each other and their distance from our solar system.
However, based solely on the colors of Earendel and its immediate surroundings, the study authors believe there are hints of a cooler, redder companion star. The light from this star has been “stretched” by the expansion of the universe to longer wavelengths than Hubble’s instruments can detect, so it has only been detectable by Webb.
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is the result of an international collaboration led by NASA, ESA and CSA, respectively the US, European and Canadian space agencies. (Source: NCYT from Amazings)
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