The Hubble Space Telescope has captured the most distant star ever observed, CNET and other foreign media reported on the 30th (local time).
The star’s official name was WHL0137-LS, which astronomers gave it the name ‘Earendel’, meaning ‘morning star’ or ‘rising light’. The distance from Earth to this star is 12.8 billion light years, and it was formed 900 million years after the Big Bang in the universe.
This star is at least 50 times the mass of our Sun, and it is far from Earth, but the star is known to be millions of times brighter than the Sun. The results of this study were published in Nature.
The farthest star ever observed was Icarus, which was 9.4 billion light-years away from Earth.
“This discovery provides a valuable opportunity to study the stars in the early universe in detail,” said Johns Hopkins University astronomer Brian Welch, lead author of the paper.
“This star is magnified by the gravitational lensing effect of the giant galaxy cluster in the foreground, and looks like a long, thin crescent,” he said. The researchers named it the ‘sunlike arc’.
Gravitational lensing refers to a phenomenon in which a celestial object with mass bends nearby space-time to refract light like a convex lens. For example, when a gravitational object passes between a star and the Earth, the starlight gradually brightens and then returns to its previous state. It gets brighter because the gravitational pull of the object passing through it attracts more starlight, sending more light to us on Earth.
Brian Welch said that he discovered aerens by accident while studying gravitational lensing, which distorts space-time.
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The research team explained that by studying Airrend through Hubble telescope observations for three and a half years, the researchers confirmed that the light emitted from the star is a real phenomenon because it is a temporary phenomenon.
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), launched in December of last year, is currently preparing for a space observation mission. In the future, the researchers want James Webb to determine whether Earendel is a single star or a binary system and provide detailed information about the star’s temperature, the researchers said.