star named erendellafter a character in JRR Tolkien’s “The Silmarillion” was discovered thanks to JRR Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings.” gravity lens in Hubble Space Telescope Deep field image. The star that took in its light 12.9 billion light years to reach a landso weak that it can be hard to find in the new James Webb Space Telescope The image, which was posted on Twitter on Tuesday (August 2) by a group of astronomers using the account JWST Cosmic Spring (Opens in a new tab).
The original Hubble image provides some guidance on where to look through the enlarged clip. Basically, the Earendel, is a small white dot below a distant group galaxies. By comparing the Hubble image with that taken by Webb, you can find Earendel quite elusive.
Gallery: The first images of the James Webb Space Telescope
We’re excited to share the first JWST image of Earendel, our universe’s most distant known star, magnified by a massive galaxy cluster. Celebrated on Saturday by JWST 2282. pic.twitter.com/YoZZKRsdzfAugust 2, 2022
Cosmic Spring astronomers wrote in a tweet, noting that the observations occurred on Saturday (July 30).
The tweet refers to the gravitational lens, which is nature’s aid to astronomers. The effect takes advantage of the fact that objects are extremely massive, such as clusters of galaxies or supermassive black holesLight bends from objects behind them. When light passes through such an object, it behaves as if it were passing through the lens of a telescope, becoming magnified, albeit also distorted. The use of gravitational lenses thus expands the reach of telescopes, such as the Hubble and Webb, enabling them to see farther and in greater detail.
Webb was designed to see the first galaxies that appeared in youth Universe In the first hundreds of millions of years after the Dark Ages after the great explosion. However, astronomers believed that it would not be possible to see the individual stars From this first generation of suns formed at that time. But a gravitational lens might actually enable them to see inside those early star clusters in detail.
“The JWST was designed to study the first stars. Until recently, we assumed that this meant that there were groups of stars within the first galaxies,” astronomers from the Space Telescope Science Institute in Maryland, which directs Webb and Hubble, wrote in a recent report. paper (Opens in a new tab) Technical discussion. “But in the past three years, three single hyper-lens stars have been discovered. This offers new hope for directly observing individual stars at cosmic distances using JWST.”
Earendel, also known by its proper name WHL0137-LS, is located in the constellation Cetusbut don’t expect to see it if you look up at the night sky – even the gravitational lens isn’t that strong.
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