Reported BBC, Thursday (31/3/2022), so far, with a distance of 12.9 billion light years, telescopes can usually only observe galaxies that contain millions of stars. But the Hubble space observatory has captured Earendel by exploiting a natural phenomenon similar to using a zoom lens.
Brian Welch, PhD student from Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, USA says this is like a gravitational lens that works like a camera. “If there is a large cluster of galaxies in the line of sight, the gravitational pull of this mass of matter will bend and magnify the light of objects farther behind,” he explained.
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Usually, says Welch, this only happens in other galaxies but in this particular case, Earendel is at a sweet spot in the lens effect. “We were lucky. This is really extreme; It’s very interesting to find something with such high magnification,” he said.
The previous record breaker was a star named Icarus who was captured by Hubble . Light from this star takes nine billion years to reach Earth. Because of that Earendel was significantly further away from Icarus.
The name Earendel comes from an Old English word meaning “morning star” or “rising light”. There’s not much to see in the Hubble photo – just a faint blob of light from the long crescent moon created by the lens dubbed the “Arc of the Rising Sun”.
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