Earendel : Celestial Body
The James Webb Space Telescope has revealed important details about Earendel, the far away celestial body.
- Earendel is a star discovered by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2022 and it is the most distant and earliest known star.
- It is a massive B-type star that is more than twice as hot as our Sun and about a million times more luminous.
- It is located in the Sunrise Arc Galaxy and is around 12.9 billion years away.
- Both Webb and Hubble were only able to detect it due to a natural phenomenon called gravitational lensing.
- The star happened to be aligned behind a wrinkle in space-time created by the galaxy cluster WHL0137-08, which is located between us and Earendel.
- Gravitational lensing occurs when a massive celestial body, such as a galaxy cluster, causes a sufficient curvature of spacetime for the path of light around it to be visibly bent, as if by a lens.
- The body causing the light to curve is accordingly called a gravitational lens.
- An important consequence of this lensing distortion is magnification, allowing us to observe objects that would otherwise be too far away and too faint to be seen.
