The star was named Earendel, meaning \u0027morning star,\u0027 which was also inspired by a character in J.R.R. Tolkien\u0027s \u0027The Silmarillion.\u0027
In recent decades, astronomers have seen galaxies at that distance, and even farther away, but galaxies are collections of billions of stars and the very distant ones have typically been nothing more than smudges of light.
What it definitely is, is a target for the newly launched James Webb Space Telescope, the Hubble’s successor. The Webb is parked in a solar orbit that keeps it roughly 1 million miles from Earth, and it is in the midst of a calibration and commissioning phase, with the first scientific observations still a few months away.
The new report describes how Earendel was detected with the aid of gravitational lensing — a phenomenon in which a closely grouped cluster of galaxies warps the space around it to magnify, distort and sometimes duplicate objects behind it. In this manner, the Hubble Space Telescope exploits a natural cosmic magnifier.
“We saw it, and at first I kind of figured it was just a very small star cluster,” Welch said. “The more I tried to model what its intrinsic properties might be, it just kept coming up that it was much smaller than a star cluster. Based on its brightness, it was more consistent with being a massive star.”
In the case of Earendel, astronomers calculate that its light has taken about 12.9 billion years to reach us. Thus, we see the object as it existed 12.9 billion years ago.Article content “Galaxies were just starting to form around that time. So you wouldn’t have the big, beautiful spiral galaxies that we see nearby today. You would have had a lot of chaotic, clumpy galaxies,” Welch said.
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