The Space Telescope James Webb have glimpsed the most distant star known in the universerevealed just a few months ago by Webb’s predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope.
The star, named Earendel, after a JRR Tolkien character in The Lord of the Rings prequel ‘The Silmarillion’, was initially discovered thanks to gravitational lensing in a deep-field image from the Hubble Space Telescope.
The star, whose light took 12.9 billion light years to reach Earth, it is so faint that it might be quite difficult to find it in the new Telescope image Space James Webb, which was posted on Twitter on August 2 by a group of astronomers using the Cosmic Spring JWST account.
The original Hubble image provides guidance on where to look through the enlarged crop. Essentially Earendel is the small whitish dot below a cluster of distant galaxies. By comparing the Hubble image with the one captured by Webb, Earendel can be found.
“We are excited to share the first JWST image of Earendel, the most distant known star in our universe, focused and magnified by a massive galaxy clusterCosmic Spring astronomers wrote in the tweet, noting that the observations occurred on Saturday, July 30.
The tweet refers to gravitational lensing, an effect that takes advantage of the fact that extremely massive bodies, such as galaxy clusters or supermassive black holes, deflect light from objects behind them.
When light passes through such a body, behaves as if passing through the lens of a telescope, increasing, but also distorting. Therefore, the use of gravitational lenses extends the reach of telescopes, such as Hubble and Webb, allowing them to see farther and in greater detail, reports Space.com.
Earendel, also known by his proper name WHL0137-LS, is located in the constellation Cetus.