Image shows the star Earendel as seen by the James Webb Space Telescope. Earendel is the most distant star ever seen, 12.9 billion light years from Earth. Photo courtesy of Cosmic Spring JWST/Twitter
Aug. 3 (UPI) — The most distant star known to exist in the universe has been spotted by the James Webb Telescope. It comes just months after scientists using the Hubble Space Telescope announced the star’s existence.
Earendel, named after a character from The Lord of the Rings, was discovered using Hubble’s gravitational lensing capability. The star is 12.9 billion light-years from Earth, the most distant object ever recorded, according to NASA.
Gravitational lensing extends the reach of telescopes by detecting objects through distorted light from objects that are behind black holes. When the warped light passes through the black holes, the light behaves as if it were passing through the lens of a telescope.
An image of the star as seen through the James Webb Telescope was released Tuesday by a group of astronomers at the Cosmic Spring JWST.
JWST is the most powerful telescope ever launched into space and uses infrared technology to observe objects further from Earth than previously possible.
“JWST was designed to study the first stars. Until recently, we assumed that this meant populations of stars within the first galaxies,” astronomers from the Space Telescope Science Institute in Maryland wrote in a paper. “But in the last three years, three separate stars with strong lensing have been discovered.”
The astronomers said this “offers new hope for direct observation of individual stars at cosmological distances”.
JWST was designed to see the first galaxies formed in the first hundreds of millions of years after the Big Bang.
Earendel, known as WHL0137-LS, is in the constellation Cetus. Not visible to the naked eye.
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