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The Hubble Space Telescope shows: This is what the farthest star from Earth looks like so far!

The Hubble Space Telescope shows: This is what the farthest star from Earth looks like so far!

NASA’s Hubble Telescope was able to capture Farthest star seen so far. Scientists named it Earendel and it is 12.9 billion light-years from Earth. In other words, its light lasted 12.9 billion years, or 12.9 billion years to be visible.

His name has a history: Earendel means “morning star” in Old English.

Astronomers were shocked by this discovery, as Earndale dates back to the first billion years of the universe’s formation. According to a NASA statement, the universe at that time was 7% of its age today.

“At first we could hardly believe it, it was very far from the farthest target previously seen,” Brian Welch, an astronomer at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in the US and one of the discoverers, said in a press release.

The results were published on Wednesday morning. in the scientific journal nature It is the culmination of years of study. Discovered from data collected during the program Study of gravitational lens reionization in clusters RELICS Hubble was led by study co-author Dan Koo at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI).

This breaks the record obtained in 2018, When Hubble himself discovered Icarusa star whose light took 5,000 million years to reach Earth.

But far from a landmark, Earendl’s discovery also marks a new line of research on the origins of the universe and the formation of stars in the first million years of the universe.

“Erndel has been around for so long that it probably didn’t have the same raw materials as the stars that surround us today,” Welch explained.

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“Studying it will become a window into an age of the universe that we’re not used to, but that has led to everything we know. It’s as if we were reading a very interesting book, but we’re starting with chapter two, and now we’ll have a chance to see how it all began.”

The stars align with technology

Welch and his team were no less surprised: discovering an individual star at such a great distance would be an almost impossible task.

“Usually, at these distances, entire galaxies are seen as tiny dots, where the light of millions of stars is mixed,” the astronomer noted.

The research team estimates that Earendel is at least 50 times the mass of our Sun and millions of times brighter, rivaling the most massive stars known. However, even such a bright and massive star would be impossible to see at such a great distance.

So what happened so that it can be clearly detected? It’s a combination of high-tech from Hubble, and the luck of capturing that place in time, when nature itself had its “magnifying glass” activated.

According to NASA, the natural increase is caused by a group of galaxies called WHL0137-08, which is located between Earth and Earendel. The cluster of a galaxy cluster distorts the fabric of space, creating a kind of “magnifying glass” that dramatically distorts and magnifies the light coming from distant objects behind the cluster.

This is how the star Earendel appears directly above (or very close to) a ripple in the fabric of space. This ripple, defined in optics as “caustic,” provides maximum magnification and brightness. This ripple is what happens, for example, on a clear sunny day we see the sun reflected in a swimming pool: the ripples of the water on the surface act as lenses and focus sunlight at maximum brightness at the bottom of the pool. Swimming pool. The same thing happens with galaxies (which would be the water) and Earendel (the brightness of the sun).

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Welch specified that “the galaxy that hosts this star has been magnified and distorted by gravitational lenses into a long crescent that we call the arc of dawn.”

All of this phenomenon makes Earndel stand out from the general glare of his home galaxy. Its brightness is amplified a thousand times or more. Therefore, at this time it is difficult to know if there is a star next to it, although, as NASA indicates on its website, it is normal for a large star to have a smaller star next to it.

This information is under development