Earendel is so far away that it appears as a point to Webb despite a massive gravitational lens between the star and the telescope.
Earendel was a star discovered by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2022 and it is the most distant and earliest known star. The James Webb Space Telescope has now revealed important details about the far away celestial body.
NASA said on Tuesday that Webb has followed up on observations by Hubble using its NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) instrument, which revealed that Earendel is a massive B-type star that is more than twice as hot as our Sun and about a million times more luminous.
The star is located in the Sunrise Arc Galaxy and is around 12.9 billion years away. Both Webb and Hubble were only able to detect it due to a natural phenomenon called gravitational lensing, where a massive foreground galaxy bends light passing through it to create a magnifying lens-like effect.
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Luckily, the star happened to be aligned behind a wrinkle in space-time created by the galaxy cluster WHL0137-08, which is located between us and Earendel.
In many cases, gravitational lenses like this reveal a lot of details about the body it is “magnifying” but in this case, Earendel is so far away that it only appears as a single point of light even on Webb’s high-resolution infrared imagers. But based on the information captured by the telescope, astronomers estimate that we are seeing it as it was 1 billion years after the Big Bang. The previous record holder was observed around 4 billion years after the big bang.
Stars as big as Earendel rarely come alone. But astronomers did not expect Webb to show any of its companions since they would be so close together from our vantage point that they would be indistinguishable.
Nevertheless, based just on the colours of Earendel, the scientists think they see hints of a cooler, redder companion star.
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First published on: 10-08-2023 at 12:00 IST
