- 4117 - MOST DISTANT
GALAXY? Astronomers have begun
measuring of the most distant star ever detected. That star, known as “Earendel”, was
discovered last year by the Hubble Space Telescope. It has taken 12.9 billion
years for Earendel's light to reach Earth, meaning the star was shining less
than a billion years after the Big Bang spurred our universe into existence.
-
-------------- 4117 - MOST DISTANT GALAXY?
- Earendel doesn't lie a mere 12.9 billion
light-years away from us right now! The
universe has been expanding at an accelerating rate since the Big Bang, the
star now lives 28 billion light-years from Earth.
-
- Earendel, the most distant known star in
the universe, is a massive B-type star more than twice as hot as our sun, and about
a million times more luminous. Hubble
was able to spot Earendel due to a phenomenon known as “gravitational lensing”,
in which the gravity of a massive foreground object sort of acts like a lens as
it warps the very fabric of space and time, bending and brightening light from
a more distant body as that light passes by.
-
- The $10 billion Hubble telescope views the
universe in infrared light. JWST's
NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) instrument reveals the star to be a massive
B-type star more than twice as hot as our sun, and about a million times more
luminous.
-
- Our sun, is a G-type star with a surface
temperature around 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit (5,500 degrees Celsius). This light has been stretched by the
expansion of the universe to wavelengths longer than Hubble's instruments can
detect, and so was only detectable with Webb.
-
- The existence of a companion would not be a
surprise; most big stars like Earendel are part of binary systems. The JWST's observations are also shedding new
light on the “Sunrise Arc”, the galaxy that Earendel calls home.
-
- They have identified a star-forming region
in the galaxy that's thought to be less than five million years old from our
perspective. Its imagery also revealed a more established star cluster near
Earendel that appears to be gravitationally stable and has perhaps even
persisted into the present day, if its stars are still alive.
-
- The discoveries have opened a new realm of
the universe to stellar physics, and new subject matter to scientists studying
the early universe, where once galaxies were the smallest detectable cosmic
objects. The research team has cautious
hope that this could be a step toward the eventual detection of one of the very
first generation of stars, composed only of the raw ingredients of the universe
created in the Big Bang, hydrogen and helium.
-
-
August 13, 2023 MOST
DISTANT GALAXY? 4117
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Sunday, August 13, 2023 ---------------------------------
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