Astronomers used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to make observations of the most distant known star.
VIEW GALLERY – 3 IMAGES
Hubble image.
The star is called Earendel, which is named after a character in the prequel book by J. RR Tolkien The Lord of the Rings The Silmarillion. The half-elven character in the book carries a jewel called the “Silmarill” across the sea, also called the morning star, which translates to Star of Dawn in Old English. As for the star itself, Eärendil was discovered through gravitational lensing through observations from the Hubble Space Telescope and its 12.9 billion light-years from Earth, making it the most distant star ever observed.
Follow-up observations of Earendel were recently conducted by astronomers using JWST data, which is just night and day compared to the images taken by Hubble. The JWST observations provided a much closer view of the star, giving astronomers and researchers a much more detailed image. In a recent paper, astronomers at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Maryland wrote that JWST was designed to see the first stars, but astronomers believe the observations will be stars in groups rather than individually.
JWST image.
“JWST was designed to study the first stars. Until recently, we assumed that this meant populations of stars within the first galaxies. But in the past three years, three separate stars with strong lenses have been discovered. This offers new hope for directly observing individual stars at cosmological distances with JWST,” wrote astronomers at the Space Telescope Science Institute.
Jack Connor
Jak joined the TweakTown team in 2017 and has since reviewed hundreds of new tech products and keeps us updated on the latest science and space news daily. Jack’s love for science, space and technology, and especially for computer games, began at the age of 10. It was the day his father showed him how to play Age of Empires on an old Compaq computer. From that day on, Jack fell in love with gaming and the development of the technology industry in all its forms. Instead of the typical FPS, Jak holds a very special place in his heart for RTS games.
Add Comment