Hubble detects the most distant star ever

What a wonderful send-off – Hubble has detected the most distant star ever just before the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is set to take over in our most important discoveries. The star, called Earendel, started shining just 900 million years after the Big Bang. It was imaged by taking advantage of the gravitational lens in spacetime that appears due the light bending around a massive cluster of galaxies, much like he curved lens in a magnifying glass.

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The observation effect revealed a far-away star system from the early universe, now called WHL0137-LS. The astronomers that made the observation nicknamed it “Earendel” from the Old English word meaning “morning star” or “rising light.”

In the paper published in Nature, the observation is described fully – an early star system that shone within just 900 million years of the Big Bang, meaning that 12.8 billion years passed before that light reached the Hubble Space Telescope, magnified by a lucky trick of gravity to appear as a tiny smudge of photons on Hubble’s image sensor. For context, Earendel is 8.2 billion years older than the Sun and Earth.

This discovery hasn’t just moved the needle, it has moved it significantly. Astronomers observed the previous record holder, nicknamed Icarus, as it appeared 9.4 billion years ago — 3.4 billion years more recently than this new record-holder. Earendel is even older than the oldest known supernovas, which are generally easier to discover since they are the brightest known objects in the cosmos.

“This galaxy appears magnified and stretched into a long, thin crescent shape due to the gravitational lensing effect of a massive cluster of galaxies in the foreground,” said Brian Welch, a Johns Hopkins University astronomer and lead author of the Nature paper. “I was creating a model of the lensing effects of the galaxy cluster, with the goal of measuring the magnification of the Sunrise Arc,” Welch said. “The models kept predicting that this one bright point on the arc should have an extremely high magnification.”