NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI
Astronomers used the James Webb space telescope to investigate whether the “morning star”, the farthest identified in the universe is, in fact, a stellar swarm.
The most distant star ever discovered may have been poorly classified.
Instead of being a single star, the object – nicknamed Earendel From the ancient English word for “morning” – It can be a star swarm, a group of stars that are linked for gravity and formed from the same cloud of gas and dust, suggests a new investigation.
Astronomers thought that Earendel, by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2022, It would be a star which formed only 900 million years after Big Bang, when the universe had only 7% of its current age.
Now, in a published July 31st in The Astrophysical Journala team of astronomers used the James Webb (JWST) space telescope to give a New Look at Earendel.
The team wanted to explore the possibility that Earendel could not be a single star or a binary system as previously thought, but in reality it is a Compact stelar swarm.
Found that the spectral characteristics of Earendel correspond to those of globular swarms – A type of stellar swarm – found in the local universe.
“What is reassuring about this work is that if Earendel is really a stellar swarm, it’s not unexpected!” Massimo PascalePhD student in Astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the main author of the study, told.
“This work concludes that Earendel seems quite consistent with what we hope that the globular swarms we see in the local universe would have seemed in the first billion of years of the universe,” the researcher adds.
Earendel, located in the Galaxy Sunrise Arc to 12.9 billion light years of us, it was discovered through a phenomenon known as Gravitational lensa phenomenon provided for by Einstein’s theory of general relativity, in which massive objects Fold the light that passes through them.
A massive galactic swarm located between Earth and Earendel is so great that distorts the tissue fabriccreating an expansion effect that allowed astronomers to observe the light of Earendel, which would otherwise be too weak to detect.
Studies indicate that the star Appears at least 4,000 times higher due to this effect of gravitational lens.
This expansion power It is stronger in some regions special. If a star or galaxy happens to be right next to one of these regions, its image can be expanded hundreds or thousands of times brighter than normal.
Earendel seems to be extremely close to one of these “key points“That is why we can see it even though it is almost 12.9 billion light years away.
Such almost perfect alignments are incredibly rarewhat made astronomers consider alternative explanations beyond a single star.
