NASA, the US space agency, announced this Wednesday (30) that The flag broke a new record with discovery The most distant star seen by astronomers, Earndel (“Morning Star”, in Old English).
the star Which is 12.9 billion light-years away from Earth, they existed when the universe was about 4 billion years old, or 30% of its current age. The previous record was for the star Icarus, whose light took 9 billion years to reach Earth.
“We almost didn’t believe it at first, it was much farther than the previous star, and much farther with a higher redshift,” said astronomer Brian Welch of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, lead author of the paper describing the phenomenon. Discovery, published in Nature.
The result was made from data collected during the RELICS program (Cluster scanning for lens reionization) from Hubble.
According to scientists, the star has been around for a long time It may not contain the same raw materials as today’s stars.
The arrow indicates the location of the farthest star that science has ever seen, Earndel. Image: NASA
“Earendel’s study will be 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’re reading an interesting book, but we’re starting with chapter two and now we have a chance to see how it all began,” Welch said.
Scientists believe that Earendel has at least Our Sun is 50 times the mass and millions of times brighterCompete with the biggest known stars.
“Usually, at this distance, entire galaxies look like little specks, mixed with the light of millions of stars,” Welch said. “The galaxy that hosts this star has been magnified and distorted by gravitational lenses into a long crescent that we call the sunrise arc.”
According to NASA, the expectation now is that the star will be observed by the James Webb Space Telescope and that the instrument’s high sensitivity will allow for more detailed observations of Eearendel.
“With Webb, we’ll be able to see stars farther than Earendel, which will be incredibly exciting,” Welch said. Let’s go back as far as we can. I’d like to see Webb break Earndel’s distance record.”
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