After a week of anticipation, NASA has finally released a historic Hubble Space Telescope image – and it is really stunning.
To summarise, the photograph seems to show the farthest
distant star ever discovered by humans. According to the scientists behind the
finding, this not only breaks a record but also gives valuable information into
the early universe and sets up a "major confirmation" for the
ultrapowerful new James Webb Space Telescope.
“We almost didn’t believe it at first, it was so much
farther than the previous most-distant, highest redshift star,” said astronomer
Brian Welch of the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, the lead researcher
behind the new image, in a blurb about the finding.
The Hubble was able to observe the star, called Earendel —
yep, that is a "Lord of the Rings" term — because of a fortunate
alignment behind a galaxy cluster, which generated a gravitational lens effect
magnifying the very distant celestial entity. Light from the star was emitted
900 million years after the Big Bang and took 12.9 billion years to travel to
Earth. That makes it on edge of space-time continuum according to Big Bang
theory.
“Normally at these distances, entire galaxies look like
small smudges, with the light from millions of stars blending together,” Welch
said. “The galaxy hosting this star has been magnified and distorted by
gravitational lensing into a long crescent that we named the Sunrise Arc.”
The discovery, revealed in recent research published in the
journal Nature, offers a view into the cosmos at a previously unknown period
when the whole makeup of stars may have been different. They want to scan it
soon with the James Webb telescope, which is currently being calibrated and is
much more powerful than the Hubble.
“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”
Reference(s): Research Paper, NASA