{"id":4043,"date":"2022-04-01T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-04-01T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/modernsciences.org\/staging\/4414\/?p=4043"},"modified":"2022-03-31T07:34:14","modified_gmt":"2022-03-31T07:34:14","slug":"the-hubble-space-telescope-just-spotted-the-most-distant-star-weve-ever-seen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/modernsciences.org\/staging\/4414\/the-hubble-space-telescope-just-spotted-the-most-distant-star-weve-ever-seen\/","title":{"rendered":"The Hubble Space Telescope Just Spotted the Most Distant Star We\u2019ve Ever Seen"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Just months after the launch of the new<\/a> James Webb Space Telescope<\/a>, the experienced Hubble Space Telescope<\/a> just proved that it\u2019s not ready to rest on its laurels just yet, as a combination of both the older space telescope\u2019s instruments and a little help from space\u2019s \u201cnatural magnifying glass\u201d just brought into Hubble\u2019s view what may be the most distant star we\u2019ve ever seen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The supposed star, nicknamed \u201cEarendel<\/em>\u201d by its discoverers from the Old English word for \u201cmorning star,\u201d is so far away that the light that Hubble just spotted with its lenses took a whopping 12.9 billion years to travel from the innards of Earendel to us here on Earth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
The star Earendel, highlighted above, was captured by the Hubble Space Telescope with the help of gravitational lensing, which warped the light of its host galaxy into an arc in the sky that the astronomers called the \u201cSunrise Arc.\u201d (NASA\/ESA\/Pagan (STScI), 2022)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Earendel was spotted using Hubble\u2019s Reionization Lensing Cluster Survey (RELICS) program, with the paper reporting on the remarkable find published in the journal Nature<\/em><\/a>. The paper about this very distant star was helmed by astronomer Brian Welch from Johns Hopkins University<\/a>, together with co-author Dan Coe who leads RELICS.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“We almost didn’t believe it at first, it was so much farther than the previous most-distant, highest redshift star,” said Welch, describing the fact that distant stars get their light stretched as the space they travel in also expands with the expanding universe, making their wavelengths longer and thus shifting their colors into the red part of the spectrum, hence the term redshifting<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
A closer look at the image taken by Hubble shows Earendel together with a mirrored star cluster along the \u201cSunrise Arc.\u201d (NASA\/ESA\/Pagan (STScI), 2022)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Welch continued in a press release from the Hubble team<\/a>: “Normally at these distances, entire galaxies look like small smudges, with the light from millions of stars blending together. The galaxy hosting this star has been magnified and distorted by gravitational lensing into a long crescent that we named the Sunrise Arc<\/em>.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Welch and the team estimate Earendel to be around fifty (50) times the mass of our own Sun and is likely millions of times as bright. However, despite these staggering numbers, even the strongest of telescopes will struggle to even catch a glimpse of a star that\u2019s so far away; luckily for Hubble, the galaxy cluster WHL0137-08 sat between us and Earendel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n