When scientists found the star Icarus in the Hubble Telescope image in 2018, it was a big sensation. compared to see “almost to the big bang”. But the newly discovered star is even deeper, or if you want an older universe. And studied it was described by the team of Brian Welch, who is only a doctoral student at Johns Hopkins University.
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The star’s distance of 12.9 billion light-years means that the light that has now been captured has only come out of it 900 million years after the Big Bang. That is, at a time when he had the universe has “lived” only 6% of its current age.
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“At first we hardly believed it, it was so much further than the known stars,” he said Welch, according to the Guardian, added that her study “will be a window into an era of the universe that we do not know, and which at the same time predestined everything we now know about the universe.”
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The star, which scientists named Earendel, looks like a small dot in the image. Under normal circumstances, however, an entire galaxy containing millions of stars would look like a small dot at such a distance.
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That’s why, according to the BBC, some astronomers will almost certainly investigate whether it is in fact a dense cluster of multiple stars. However, Welch is sure that the Hubble Telescope has actually captured a single or at most two stars.
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According to scientists, the discovery was possible only due to a rare phenomenon called gravitational lens or gravitational lensing, when an object with a very strong gravitational field (at the strongest lensing, mainly galaxies and clusters of galaxies) bends rays of light similar to the lens used in glasses, and so this “cosmic telescope “shows distant objects behind her.
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Usually, according to the BBC, only other distant galaxies will appear, but under suitable circumstances, which occurred during the discovery of Earendel, the star itself may also appear. “If you hit the right place, as happened to us, you can achieve an increase of thousands,” Welch said, adding that they were very lucky.
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According to study co – author Guillaume Mahler of Durham University such a situation may not be repeated during our lives, and Earendel will remain the “oldest star we will ever see.”
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It is not yet clear what type of star it is. The newer and more powerful James Webb Telescope could provide answers. Welch and his team already have the promised opportunity to use him for new and better observations.
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