The James Webb Space Telescope examines the farthest star and discovers surprising things

Eärendel is the farthest star known to man so far. Now a NASA research team is revealing new findings about it.

Washington, DC – Eärendel is the most distant human-discovered star in the universe. Now, a NASA research team has continued to observe the star using the James Webb Space Telescope, making groundbreaking discoveries, the US space agency reported in a statement. press release to explain. What new insights can scientists provide about the very distant star?

12.9 billion-year-old Eärendel star: 50 times the mass of our Sun

Originally, the researchers had explored Arendelle using the Hubble Space Telescope. After that, experts assumed that the age of the star was about 12.9 billion years.

“There has been a long-standing theoretical prediction that stars consisting only of elements formed shortly after the Big Bang – hydrogen, helium and traces of lithium – should be more massive than stars formed today,” said Erik Zackrisson of Uppsala University. Sweden, a scientist involved in NASA’s recent research to find organic matter on Mars.

“These primordial stars, known as Population III stars, have so far eluded observers, but they can be detected if they are greatly magnified by gravitational lensing, as in the case of the Eärendel object,” Zacharison said. Preliminary results at the time revealed that Eärendel is said to be 50 times as massive as our Sun, and about a million times brighter than the largest stars known. The research team is cautiously hopeful that this is a step towards the eventual discovery of a first-generation star.

Amplified by a factor of 4,000: The research team explores the outermost star

With the help of the more powerful James Webb Space Telescope, researchers have learned more about the star and its galaxy. Because of the favorable alignment behind a fold in space-time created by supercluster WHL0137-08, it was possible to identify the star. The galaxy cluster between Earth and Eärendel is said to be so massive that it distorts the very fabric of space, creating a magnifying effect that allows researchers to peer across the galaxy cluster as if through a magnifying glass.

Thanks to the space telescope, the researchers were able to see that Earendel only appears as a single point of light in high-resolution infrared images, while other features of the galaxy appear multiple times due to what’s known as gravitational lensing. Therefore, the researchers believe that the star can be seen magnified by a factor of 4,000, which confirms its distance from Earth. This makes it the most distant star whose first light has been determined to be about a billion years after the Big Bang.