Date of publication: 31 Mar 2022 • 22 minutes ago • 3 minutes reading • Take part in the discussion
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WASHINGTON – Using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, scientists have discovered the farthest single star ever recorded, a bright beast they named Earendel – in Old English for the “morning star” – because it existed at dawn. The researchers said that the star, very hot and blue, was estimated to be 50 to 100 times the mass of our sun, while it was millions of times brighter. Its light traveled for 12.9 billion years before reaching Earth, which means that the star existed when the universe was only 7 percent of its current age.
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Arendel was born about 900 million years after the Big Bang at the beginning of the universe. It belonged to the first generations of stars at a time when the universe was quite different from what it is today. “This really opens a new window into those early days of the universe,” said astronomer Brian Welch of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, lead author of the study, which was published this week in the journal Nature. “We see the star in the time period often referred to as Cosmic Dawn – when the first light in the universe began to light up with these first stars and when the first galaxies began to form,” Welch added. Explaining his nickname, Welch said, the researchers realized that the “morning star” that existed during the Cosmic Dawn period was “a good parallel.”
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“It’s also for the Lord of the Rings nerds out there,” he added, noting that Earendel is the same old English word used by author JRR Tolkien to inspire a character from “The Silmarillion” to become a star. . Observing objects as far away as Earendel, scientists are looking into the deep past because of the enormous distance light has traveled from the star to Earth – in a sense, using Hubble as a time machine. “Well, normally when we look at very distant objects, what we see is light from an entire galaxy – so millions of stars all mix together – and we could see them even farther away. “But in this case, thanks to a very large cluster of galaxies in the foreground, the light from this one star has just grown very, very large, so we can see this unique star at a much greater distance,” Welch said. he said.
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Earendel’s first Hubble images were taken in 2016, with subsequent observations in 2019. Researchers hope to study it further using the next-generation James Webb Space Telescope, which will be operational within months of its launch in December. Welch said researchers were surprised by the discovery, saying: “Yes, there was definitely a time when I was wondering if this could be true.” So far, the most distant star ever recorded was one with the nickname Icarus, which existed 4 billion years after Arendel. Earendel was probably very different from the stars that inhabit the universe today. Welch said it probably consists mostly of hydrogen and helium, with traces of perhaps heavier elements such as carbon, nitrogen and oxygen.
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Welch said the first stars formed about 100 million years after the Big Bang erupted, and that perhaps one or two generations of stars preceded the formation of Earendel. Heavier elements did not exist until they were forged into the fusion cauldrons of the nuclei of early star generations and then launched into space when these first stars exploded at the end of their life cycle. Although scientists on Earth can now see its light, Earendel itself certainly no longer exists, with such huge stars having a relatively short lifespan, Welch said. It existed for perhaps a few hundred million years before it died in a supernova explosion. “Big stars tend to live fast and die young,” Welch said. (Report by Will Dunham, Edited by Rosalba O’Brien)
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