Earendel revealed: James Webb Space Telescope lifts veil on the most distant star known in the unive [View all]

[Judi Lynn]

By Mike Wall published 1 day ago
Earendel is about twice as hot as the sun, and it probably has a stellar companion.

Astronomers have begun measuring of the most distant star ever detected, thanks to the powerful eyes of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

That star, known as Earendel, was discovered last year by the Hubble Space Telescope. It has taken 12.9 billion years for Earendel's light to reach Earth, meaning the star was shining less than a billion years after the Big Bang spurred our universe into existence. However, Earendel doesn't lie a mere 12.9 billion light-years away from us.

Because the universe has been expanding at an accelerating rate since the Big Bang, the star now lives a whopping 28 billion light-years from Earth.



Imagery by the James Webb Space Telescope’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) instrument reveals that Earendel, the most distant known star in the universe, is a massive B-type star more than twice as hot as our sun, and about a million times more luminous. (Image credit: Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, D. Coe (STScI/AURA for ESA; Johns Hopkins University), B. Welch (NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Center; University of Maryland, College Park). Image processing: Z. Levay.)

Hubble was able to spot Earendel thanks to a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing, in which the gravity of a massive foreground object sort of acts like a lens as it warps the very fabric of space and time, bending and brightening light from a more distant body as that light passes by.

More:
https://www.space.com/james-webb-space-telescope-earendel-star