A Earendel star, the most distant ever observed, got its nickname after the work of JRR Tolkien, author of fantasy books. Despite the star’s technical designation being WHL0137-LS, the team behind the discovery gave it a rather apt name. “Earendel” is an Old English term and is also the name of the character Eärendil from O Lord of the Rings – one of the author’s most famous works.
Earendel’s discovery was announced this week, and if the name sounded familiar to fans of the stories created by Tolkien, it’s because it was really inspired by the author’s creations. “This star has the wonderful name of Earendel, and that actually came from Tolkien,” explained Michelle Thaller, astronomer at NASA who is not part of the team that identified the star.
In Old English, the term “Earendel” can serve as a proper name, but it can also mean “the morning star” or “the dawn”. Meanwhile, in Lord of the Ringsthe character Eärendil is a demi-elf who travels the seas carrying the Silmaril gem, called the “morning star”.
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The star detected by the Hubble telescope is 12.9 billion light years from Earth, which makes the choice of name quite suitable. “And this star, literally, is from the dawn of time, the dawn of star formation,” Thaller said. “This is the first star, the farthest we’ve ever observed, and I think Earendel is a beautiful name for it.”
A estrela Earendel
Earendel was discovered by observations of the Hubble Space Telescope, and existed for the first billion years after the Big Bang. As it is 12.9 billion light-years away from us, it appears to us as it was in the past, when the universe was 7% of its age today. The team that discovered it believes the star is at least 50 solar masses and a few million times as bright as our star.
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Despite being quite far away, the star may not be exactly part of the absolute first generation of stars that ever existed. “We suspect this not the first generation of stars,” noted Thaller. “We think that maybe this is from a [geração] subsequent… maybe a few tens of millions of years after star formation began in the universe,” he said.
In addition, she also added that “the young man who discovered the star chose the name” — in his speech, he probably referred to Brian Welch, astronomer and lead author of the paper describing the discovery. How his personal interest in Tolkien’s work was manifested by the choice of name, but Thaller added that both she and other staff members are big fans of the author.
Source: Space.com
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