“These are the sorts of things that you only hope you could discover.”
In images of one cluster, astronomer Brian Welch of Johns Hopkins University and colleagues noticed a long, thin, red arc. The team realized that the arc was a background galaxy whose light the cluster had warped and amplified.
Atop that red arc is a bright spot that is too small to be a small galaxy or a star cluster, the researchers say. “We stumbled into finding that this was a lensed star,” Welch says. The researchers estimate that the star’s light originates from only 900 million years after the Big Bang, which took place about 13.8 billion years ago.
Welch and his colleagues think that the object, which they poetically nicknamed “Earendel” from the old English word meaning “morning star” or “rising light,” is a behemoth with at least 50 times the mass of the sun. But the researchers can’t pin down that value, or learn more about the star or even confirm that it is a star, without more detailed observations.
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