Nasa’s Hubble Space Telescope has found the furthest individual star to date. The Earendel star was born in the first billion years of the universe’s creation. The star is 28 billion light-years away from Earth. Astronomers saw the light from Earendel as it was when the cosmos was barely 7% of its present age.
On March 30, 2022, this space news outlining the discovery was released.
Discovering Earendel with the Help of the Hubble Space Telescope:
Astronomers at the National Space Institute, Technical University of Denmark, and the Cosmic Dawn Center at the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, Denmark, were able to identify Earendel via a phenomenon called “gravitational lensing.” Using Hubble’s RELICS (Reionization Lensing Cluster Survey) tool, the astronomers discovered Earendel.
According to astronomers, the brightness of Earendel is a million times greater than that of the Sun. In a remarkable cosmic coincidence, the galaxies in the cluster WHL0137-08 lined up to direct a single star’s light onto Earth, amplifying it millions of times. With gravitational lenses and nine hours of Hubble Space Telescope exposure, an international team of scientists could identify Earendel.
Farthest Star Ever:
The finding may be up to 500 times bigger than the Sun, representing the farthest detection of a single star. The light from the previous single-star record took nine billion years to reach Earth. It is a massive blue star known as “Icarus,” which the Hubble telescope discovered in 2018. Icarus lived when the universe was around four billion years old.
Gravitational Lensing:
The study’s principal author, astronomer Brian Welch of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, stated that gravitational lensing has amplified and warped the galaxy that houses Earendel into a long crescent shape called the Sunrise Arc.
Welch and his colleagues carefully examined the galaxy. They concluded that one of its features was an extraordinarily magnified star they named Earendel, an ancient English phrase for “morning star” or “rising light.”
James Webb Space Telescope to Verify if Earendel is Only One Star:
One of the study’s authors, Sune Toft, stated that the James Webb Space Telescope would allow scientists to confirm that Eärendel is just one star. He said that Webb would enable an analysis of Earendel’s chemical make-up.
In the NASA announcement, one of the study’s co-authors stated that the researchers anticipate discovering that the Sunrise Arc galaxy is deficient in heavy elements. This would imply that Earendel is a rare, massive, metal-poor star.
Final Thoughts:
Astronomers will be very interested in Earendel’s composition since it developed before the cosmos was full of the heavy elements created by subsequent generations of massive stars. Because Eärendel lived so long ago, it might not have contained the same essential components as the stars we see now.
