SCIENCE: NASA, ESA, Brian Welch (JHU), Dan Coe (STScI) IMAGE PROCESSING: NASA, ESA, Alyssa Pagan (STScI) Scientists using the Hubble Space Telescope have discovered a very distant simple star or star system that exists about 900 million years after the Big Bang, which occurred 13.8 billion years ago. The amazing discovery – described by NASA as a “record breaking” – was published in Nature today. At 12.9 billion light-years away, it is the most distant single star ever seen, although a galaxy called GN-z11 was discovered in 2017 at a distance of 13.4 billion light-years away. This ancient distant star is nicknamed “Earendel”, which comes from an Old English word meaning “morning star” or “rising light”. Its directory name is WHL0137-LS. Earendel is much further away from previous observations of similar systems. In 2018 a huge blue star nicknamed Icarus became the most distant single star ever seen in the nine billion light years. Earendel is estimated to have a mass greater than 50 times the mass of the Sun. It was found using the Hubble Space Telescope as part of the Reionization Lensing Cluster Survey (RELICS) program, which depicts huge clusters of galaxies to find the brightest distant galaxies to study the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). MORE THAN FORBESAsteroid The size of a piano with a tail hits the ground and we knew exactly where and when NASABy says Jamie Carter The research will tell us more about our cosmic origins, but how Arendel was found is unbelievable. Led by Brian Welch at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, the team used a cluster of galaxies as a natural “magnifying glass”, called a “gravitational lens”. Gravitational lens is the best way to discover incredibly distant stars. Describes the effect of the gravity of a star or galaxy in the foreground when light is bent by a star or galaxy in the background. This is because mass bends space (as predicted by Einstein), so light from the background star takes a different path. In Earendel’s case a distant star was magnified by a closer object in the foreground, a huge cluster of galaxies called WHL0137–08 (also called WHL J24.3324-8.477 and nicknamed “Sunrise Arc”), which Hubble photographed previously part of the same RELICS program: At the center of this infrared image of the Hubble Space Telescope is the center of a huge galaxy … [+] cluster named WHL J24.3324-8.477, including the brightest galaxy cluster. Received in 2017 as part of an observation program called RELICS (Reionization Lensing Cluster Survey). ESA / Habble & NASA The gravitational lens revealed that Earendel was either a single star or a double star system. Astronomers are excited because Arendel has shifted to red 6.2. So is Ardel a red giant star? No — just because we detect very old light is red because it has stretched over time as it travels through space. Red light has the longest wavelength. As the Universe expands, very distant stars and galaxies appear to be moving away from us at higher speeds than the nearest galaxies. So their light is redder. The redness of its light is the way researchers can calculate the distance of Arendel because the redder its light, the earlier it must have existed in the history of the Universe. “We hardly believed it at first, it was much farther away than the previous farther, higher redshift star,” Welch said. “The galaxy that hosts this star has been magnified and deformed by the gravitational lens into a long crescent that we called the Sunrise.” To put it in perspective, the previous record for locating a star using a gravitational lens was in much smaller redshifts of about 1-1.5. This detailed view underlines the position of the Earendel star along a ripple in space-time (moment … [+] line) that magnifies it and makes it possible to detect the star at such a great distance — almost 13 billion light-years. A cluster of stars reflected on both sides of the zoom bar is also indicated. The distortion and magnification are created by the mass of a huge cluster of galaxies between Hubble and Earendel. The mass of the galaxy cluster is so large that it distorts the fabric of space, and looking through this space is like looking through a magnifying glass – along the edge of the glass or lens, the appearance of things on the other side is distorted. as well as magnified. SCIENCE: NASA, ESA, Brian Welch (JHU), Dan Coe (STScI) IMAGE PROCESSING: NASA, ESA, Alyssa Pagan (STScI) Researchers hope to soon be able to use the Webb telescope – a complete and sensitive infrared telescope designed specifically to find displaced objects – to measure Earendel temperature, mass and spectral properties. “With Webb we expect to confirm that Earendel is indeed a star, as well as measure its brightness and temperature,” said co-author Dan Coe at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore. “We are also waiting to see that the Sunrise Arc galaxy lacks the heavy elements that form in the next generation of stars. “This suggests that Arendel is a rare, huge metal-poor star.” It is believed that the Webb telescope may even discover that magnified stars such as Earendel are common. I wish you clear skies and open eyes.
