The James Webb Space Telescope has caught a glimpse of Earendel, the oldest and most distant star ever observed, first discovered by the Hubble Space Telescope earlier this year.
Earendel was first imaged by Hubble in March, when the legendary telescope beat its own previous record, set in 2018, for capturing the oldest and most distant star. This star, called Icarus, existed when the universe was about four billion years old, or about 30% of its current age. But Earendel broke that record and existed when the universe was only 7% of its current age. The light thrown from Earendel took 12.9 billion years to reach Hubble.
Shared by the Cosmic Spring Astronomy Group, the above is the first image of Earendel taken by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).
Normally, the light emitted by stars at such a great distance looks like nothing more than tiny specks, as the light from millions of stars mixes together and becomes difficult to distinguish. But astronomers are lucky in Earendel’s case because the galaxy it’s in has been magnified and distorted by gravitational lensing.
“You can see Earendel as objectified by the cluster, WHL0137-08, in the center of the image,” Cosmic Spring wrote, explaining that JWST was able to capture the distant star for the same reason Hubble was.
Looking at the photo, one might easily assume that the giant star in the center of the image is Earendel, but this is not the case. Instead, the distant star is almost hidden in a small arc of light in the lower right corner.
Here she is!! pic.twitter.com/svMrtGtXat
— Cosmic Spring JWST (@CosmicSprngJWST) August 2, 2022
JWST was able to take this photo and see Earendel thanks to data provided by Hubble’s observation. Below is a gif created by the astronomers that shows the Hubble photo of the region compared to the new one taken by the state-of-the-art JWST:
Watch these galaxies brighten and pop as the Hubble image fades into the JWST image of the same galaxy cluster. pic.twitter.com/FkfGOrfAS7
— Cosmic Spring JWST (@CosmicSprngJWST) August 2, 2022
Astronomers only saw this image on Saturday and are still working through the details of the sighting and plan to provide more information once they have a chance to examine the data more closely.
Image credits: NASA, ESA, CSA and STScI
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