After the Hubble telescope in 2022, now it has been James Webb’s turn to observe Eärendel, the most distant star in the universe discovered to date. Through the NIRCam instrument, the James Webb Telescope revealed a new image and more information about the star. According to NASA, Earendel, which is located in the Sunrise Arc galaxy, is “a massive B-type star, twice as hot as the Sun and about a million times as luminous.”
The star is so far away that it took 12.9 billion years for its light to reach Earth. Therefore, it can only be observed through an effect called “gravitational lensing”, formed by the galaxy cluster WHL0137-08.
In images from the James Webb Telescope, Earendel appears as “a single point of light”. In this way, scientists estimate that the light from the star has been magnified at least four thousand times and that it is “extremely small.”
Stars as massive as this often have neighboring stars. However, according to NASA, the experts did not expect to find any other objects in the vicinity of Eärendel, since “it would not be possible to distinguish them”.
Still, the star’s colors seem to reveal that Earendel is accompanied by a “cooler, redder star.”
“The expansion of the universe caused the light of the possible star to extend to longer wavelengths than those visible by Hubble, which is why it was only detected with Webb,” adds the US space agency.
Source: TSF
