NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has captured new images of Earendel, the most distant star ever detected by astronomers.
The photos are expected to help researchers take a closer insight into the celestial body, which derives its name from Old English words meaning “morning star” or “rising light.”
The massive B-type star, which was discovered last year, is thought to be at least 50 times the mass of the Sun, about one million times more luminous and more than twice as hot.
A Twitter screenshot of a photo of a most distant star made with the help of the James Webb Space Telescope
© Photo : Twitter/@vishnu_ksajeev
“But even such a brilliant, very high-mass star would be impossible to see at such a great distance without the aid of natural magnification by a huge galaxy cluster, WHL0137-08, sitting between us and Earendel,” NASA officials explained in a statement on Friday.
They earlier noted that the discovery of the “morning star” might add to opening “a new realm of the universe to stellar physics, and new subject matter to scientists studying the early universe, where once galaxies were the smallest detectable cosmic objects.”
"The research team has cautious hope that this could be a step toward the eventual detection of one of the very first generation of stars, composed only of the raw ingredients of the universe created in the Big Bang — hydrogen and helium," NASA added.
Previous estimates suggested that Earendel is located 12.9 billion light-years away from Earth. Astronomers, however, explained that given the expansion of the Universe and how long the light has traveled to reach the Earth - Earendel is currently 28 billion light-years away.
The previous oldest and most distant single star was observed by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2018. NASA said at the time that the light from that star, named Icarus, took 9 billion years to reach Earth. A US broadcaster cited Victoria Strait, co-author of the initial study on Earendel, as saying last year that exploration of the old stars add to shedding more light of the origin 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," Strait pointed out.