Earendel emitted its light approximately 900 million years after the Big Bang.
This Webb/NIRCam image shows Earendel (center), the most distant star ever detected. Image credit: NASA / ESA / CSA / STScI.
Earendel, also known as WHL0137-LS, is a very massive star located in the constellation of Cetus.
This star was discovered earlier this year by astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.
The object was nicknamed after the Old English word for ‘morning star’ or ‘rising light.’
Earendel is so far away that its light has taken 12.9 billion years to reach Earth, appearing to us as it did when the Universe was only 7% of its current age.
It is at least 50 times the mass of the Sun and millions of times as bright, rivaling the most massive stars known.
Stars this large usually explode as supernovae just a few million years after forming.
But even such a brilliant, very high-mass star would be impossible to see at a great distance without the aid of natural magnification by a massive galaxy cluster, WHL0137-08, sitting between Earth and Earendel.
The galaxy cluster’s mass warps the fabric of space, creating a powerful magnifying glass that distorts and greatly amplifies the light from distant objects behind it.
Earendel’s parent galaxy, WHL0137-zD1, was nicknamed ‘Sunrise Arc,’ because gravitational lensing distorted its light into a crescent.
This Webb/NIRCam image shows the massive galaxy cluster WHL0137-08; Earendel is indicated by white circle. Image credit: NASA / ESA / CSA / STScI.
On July 30, 2022, the WHL0137-08 galaxy cluster, Earendel and its host galaxy were observed by the Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) onboard the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope.
NIRCam is Webb’s primary imager designed to capture light ranging in wavelength from 0.6 microns (visible red) to 5 microns (mid-infrared).
It has two modules pointing to adjacent fields of view; each module uses a dichroic to observe simultaneously in a short wavelength channel (0.6-2.3 microns) and a long wavelength channel (2.4-5 microns).
NIRCam will detect light from the earliest stars and galaxies in the process of formation, the population of stars in nearby galaxies, as well as Kuiper Belt objects in our Solar System and young stars in the Milky Way.
