Tag Archives: Earendel

Science

The James Webb Space Telescope Has Its First Image of The Most Distant Known Star

Leave a comment

A little under 13 billion years ago, a large blue star lit up the early cosmos.

Across countless light years of expanding space that light has shone, reduced to shadow wherever it met dust and rock.

 

What little remained of those ancient photons was pulled out of shape by the growth of space itself, warping and bending as it skirted the gravity wells of interceding stars and galaxies.

Finally, earlier this year, some of this light fell upon the lens of a telescope orbiting a small, water-logged planet, giving us a look at a truly ancient star.

The images provided by Hubble were extraordinary. But scientists who saw it said this light was special enough to use a different telescope to get a closer look.

Coded WHL0137-LS, though better known for its Tolkienesque name Earendel, the star now holds the record for the earliest, most distant star we humans have ever had the fortune to catch sight of.

So on 30 July 2022, the James Webb Space Telescope turned its attention to the corner of the sky dominated by the constellation Cetus, where this dim, twisted arc of ancient sunlight was last seen.

Its dim rays are so bent out of shape, so thin and stretched, it’s hard to tell much about the object that made them. So far we know Earendel is probably hot and big – somewhere between 50 and 100 solar masses. This makes it likely to burn out faster, winking out in a supernova just millions of years after it first sparked to life.

Igniting around 900 million years after the Big Bang, it’s unlikely to be among the very first stars in the Universe, though still emerged at a time when heavier elements were somewhat scarce.

Whatever more we can learn from its spectrum will have to wait a little longer. With the JWST capable of discerning details that the Hubble space telescope can’t, astronomers might soon be able to glean a few more clues about this new record holder.

Earendel’s tired light has traveled so far to get here. Whatever it has to say, we’re sure it’s worth waiting a little longer to listen to.

 



Read original article here

Science

Webb glimpses, Earendel, the most distant known star

Leave a comment

The James Webb Space Telescope has caught a glimpse of the most distant star known in the universe, which had been announced by scientists using Webb’s predecessor the Hubble Space Telescope only a few months ago. 

The star, named Earendel, after a character in J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” prequel “The Silmarillion,” was discovered thanks to gravitational lensing in a Hubble Space Telescope deep field image. The star, whose light took 12.9 billion light-years to reach Earth, is so faint that it might be rather challenging to find it in the new James Webb Space Telescope image, which was released on Twitter on Tuesday (Aug. 2) by a group of astronomers using the account Cosmic Spring JWST (opens in new tab). 

The original Hubble image provides some guidance as to where to look through the zoomed-in cut-out. Essentially, Earendel, is the tiny whitish dot below a cluster of distant galaxies. By comparing the Hubble image with that captured by Webb, you can find the elusive Earendel.

Gallery: James Webb Space Telescope’s 1st photos

See more

“We’re excited to share the first JWST image of Earendel, the most distant star known in our universe, lensed and magnified by a massive galaxy cluster,” the Cosmic Spring astronomers wrote in the tweet, noting that the observations occurred on Saturday (July 30).

The tweet refers to gravitational lensing, which is nature’s help for astronomers. The effect takes advantage of the fact that extremely massive bodies, such as galaxy clusters or supermassive black holes, bend light from objects behind them. When light passes by such a body, it behaves as if it were passing through the lens of a telescope, becoming magnified, albeit also distorted. Using gravitational lensing therefore extends the reach of telescopes, such as Hubble and Webb, enabling them to see farther and in greater detail.

Webb was designed to see the first galaxies that sprung up in the young universe in the first hundreds of millions of years following the dark ages after the Big Bang. Astronomers, however, thought that it would not be possible to see individual stars of this first generation of suns that formed at that time. But gravitational lensing might actually enable them to see inside those early stellar groupings in detail.

“JWST was designed to study the first stars. Until recently, we assumed that meant populations of stars within the first galaxies,” astronomers from the Space Telescope Science Institute in Maryland, which operates Webb and Hubble, wrote in a recent paper (opens in new tab) discussing the technique. “But in the past three years, three individual strongly lensed stars have been discovered. This offers a new hope of directly observing individual stars at cosmological distances with JWST.”

Earendel, also known under its proper name WHL0137-LS, is located in the constellation of Cetus, but don’t expect to see it if you look up at the night sky — even gravitational lensing isn’t that powerful.

Follow Tereza Pultarova on Twitter at @TerezaPultarova. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook. 



Read original article here

Science

Meet Earendel: Hubble telescope’s distant star discovery gets a Tolkien-inspired name

Leave a comment

Scientists using the Hubble Space Telescope  just made a remarkable discovery, and they gave it quite a unique name. 

A team of researchers led by Brian Welch, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, announced Wednesday (March 30) that, with observations from Hubble, they have discovered the most distant single star ever before seen. And, while the star’s technical designation is WHL0137-LS, they gave it a much catchier name: Earendel. 

Fans of the author J.R.R. Tolkien, famous for fantasy novels including “The Lord of the Rings” series and “The Silmarillion,” might already find this name familiar. 

And, as NASA astronomer Michelle Thaller confirmed to Space.com, the name is, in fact, inspired by Tolkien’s fantasy writing. 

This star “has the wonderful name of Earendel, and that’s actually from Tolkien,” Thaller said. 

(Thaller was not a part of the discovery team but represents four science divisions at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland — Earth science, planetary science, heliophysics and astrophysics — as the center’s assistant director for science communication.)

Related: The best Hubble Space Telescope images of all time!

NASA astronomer Michelle Thaller shows off her elvish tattoos. (Image credit: NASA/Space.com/Screenshot)

In Old English, Earendel is a personal name, but it also can mean “the morning star” or “the dawn.” In the Lord of the Rings, Eärendil is a half-elven character who travels the seas carrying a jewel, a “Silmaril,” called the morning star. 

“It means the dawn star, and it’s an Old English word. It’s lovely. And this is a star, literally, from the dawn of time, the dawn of stars forming,” Thaller said about the star’s name. “This is the first star, the farthest star we’ve ever seen, and I think Earendel is a beautiful name for it.”

“We suspect it’s not the absolute first generation of stars,” she added. “We think that maybe this is one of the subsequent … maybe a couple tens of millions of years after star formation began [in the universe].”

But, while this distant star, which lies a whopping 12.9 billion light-years from Earth, might not be from the absolute first generation of stars in existence, it is the most distant single star ever found, so the name seems quite fitting. 

Thaller added that “the young man who discovered the star picked the name,” likely referring to Welch. But, while Welch’s personal interest in Tolkien came through with this name, Thaller added that she and many other members of the team are fans of Tolkien’s work as well. 

In fact, in speaking with Space.com over a video call, Thaller even showed off tattoos she has on each arm — writing in the elvish language that Tolkien created for works like “The Silmarillion.”

Email Chelsea Gohd at cgohd@space.com or follow her on Twitter @chelsea_gohd. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.



Read original article here

Science

Earendel star: Hubble Space Telescope sees most distant star ever, 28 billion light-years away

Leave a comment

It’s the farthest detection of a star yet, from 900 million years after the big bang. Astronomers have nicknamed the star Earendel, derived from an Old English words that means “morning star” or “rising light.”

A study detailing the findings published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

This observation breaks the record set by Hubble in 2018 when it observed a star that existed when the universe was around four billion years old. Earendel is so distant that the starlight has taken 12.9 billion years to reach us.

This observation of Earendel could help astronomers to investigate the early years of the universe.

“As we peer into the cosmos, we also look back in time, so these extreme high-resolution observations allow us to understand the building blocks of some of the very first galaxies,” said study coauthor Victoria Strait, a postdoctoral research at the Cosmic Dawn Center in Copenhagen, in a statement.

“When the light that we see from Earendel was emitted, the Universe was less than a billion years old; only 6% of its current age. At that time it was 4 billion lightyears away from the proto-Milky Way, but during the almost 13 billion years it took the light to reach us, the Universe has expanded so that it is now a staggering 28 billion lightyears away.”

The stars we see in the night sky all exist in our own Milky Way galaxy. Incredibly powerful telescopes can only see individual stars within the closest galaxies. But distant galaxies look like a blur of the light blended from the billions of stars they contain.

But gravitational lensing, which was predicted by Albert Einstein, allows for deeper gazing into the distant universe. Gravitational lensing occurs when closer objects act like a magnifying glass for distant objects. Gravity essentially warps and magnifies the light of distant background galaxies.

When light passes close to massive objects, it follows a curve around that object. If that object is between Earth (or in this case, Hubble) and the distant light source, it can actually deflect and send the light toward us, acting as a lens to magnify its intensity.

Many distant galaxies have been found this way.

In this case, the alignment of a massive cluster of galaxies acted like a magnifying glass and intensifying the light of Earendel thousands of times. This gravitational lensing, combined with nine hours of observation time on Hubble and an international team of astronomers, created the record-breaking image.

“Normally at these distances, entire galaxies look like small smudges, with the light from millions of stars blending together,” said lead author Brian Welch, astronomer at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, in a statement. “The galaxy hosting this star has been magnified and distorted by gravitational lensing into a long crescent that we named the Sunrise Arc.”

To ensure that this truly is a single star, rather than two located very close to one another, the research team will use the recently launched James Webb Space Telescope to observe Earendel. Webb could also reveal the temperature and mass of the star.

“With James Webb, we will be able to confirm that Earendel is indeed just one star, and at the same time quantify which type of star it is,” said study coauthor Sune Toft, leader of the Cosmic Dawn Center and professor at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, in a statement. “Webb will even allow us to measure its chemical composition. Potentially, Earendel could be the first known example of the Universe’s earliest generation of stars.”

Astronomers want to know more about the star’s composition because it was formed early after the universe began, long before the universe was filled with the heavy elements created by the deaths of massive stars.

Webb could reveal if Earendel is largely made of primordial hydrogen and helium, making it a Population III star — the stars hypothesized to exist shortly after the big bang.

“Earendel existed so long ago that it may not have had all the same raw materials as the stars around us today,” Welch said. “Studying Earendel will be a window into an era of the universe that we are unfamiliar with, but that led to everything we do know. It’s like we’ve been reading a really interesting book, but we started with the second chapter, and now we will have a chance to see how it all got started.”

And the Webb telescope may help astronomers to find even more distant stars than Hubble can find.

“With Webb, we may see stars even farther than Earendel, which would be incredibly exciting,” Welch said. “We’ll go as far back as we can. I would love to see Webb break Earendel’s distance record.”

Read original article here