The Hubble Space Telescope has shocked astronomers by discovering a very old star, Erendel, which probably existed just one billion years after the Big Bang.
Now, the experts have used Hubble’s powerful infrared partner, the James Webb Space Telescope, to investigate, and the first look reveals even more details about the star. To the scientists’ surprise, Erendel may actually have more cold, red cosmic companions. another star. The expansion of the universe stretched the other light source to longer wavelengths than Hubble could sense, so only Webb could find clues to them.
“Astronomers did not expect Webb to reveal the Erendel companions because they are so close together in the sky that they are indistinguishable,” the journal said. Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.
Studying a star like Elendelle is valuable because it holds secrets about how the universe works. Believed to be 13.8 billion years oldstarted and evolved. Webb, the leading space observatory run by NASA and the European and Canadian space agencies, has given scientists new insights into the types of stars and the galaxies around them, known as “stars.” sunrise arc. Future telescopic studies may reveal even more information about the star’s brightness, temperature and composition.
of new discovery Erendel, which means “morning star” in Old English, indicates a B-type star that is more than twice as hot as the Sun and about a million times brighter.
Hubble was able to detect Elendel last year due to a natural oddity known as gravitational lensing. This phenomenon occurs when a celestial body has such a large gravitational pull that it distorts time and space around it.
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NASA often uses the analogy of a bowling ball on a foam mattress or trampoline to explain how the fabric of space-time bends. Light, which should normally travel in a straight line, draws a curved line when passing through the distorted space-time.
Gravitational lensing can even duplicate objects. This is so that the entertainment center’s mirrors can make multiple, irregular copies of the image.
In this case, Ellendel appears only once, but the galaxy cluster WHL0137-08, about 28 billion light-years away from Earth, acts like a giant magnifying glass. It distorts space-time, allowing scientists to see even more distant objects in space. The extra prescription strength of gravitational lensing helps expand the telescope’s field of view to see even earlier galaxies.
Astronomers are now adept at spotting the obvious tricks of gravitational lensing, but that wasn’t always true. In 1987, a giant blue arc believed to be hundreds of trillion miles long was first thought to be one of the largest objects ever detected in the universe. Later that year, scientists, with the help of Einstein’s theory of general relativity, figured out that what they were really seeing was an optical illusion distorted by clusters of galaxies. The New York Times published an article stating: “strange” connotations Their discovery was titled “Giant Cosmic Objects Downgraded to Mirages”.
Since Hubble discovered Elendell, Webb has discovered other things. very distant (and therefore old) stars It uses gravitational lensing techniques, but nothing too far off. Another group of scientists discovered a star nicknamed Quillul, a red giant observed about 3 billion years after the Big Bang.
“The research team has cautious hopes that this could finally be a step towards detecting one of the first-generation stars,” the institute said. helium. ”
