A Record Broken: Hubble Finds the Most Distant Star Ever Seen | NASA
March 30, 2022: The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has established an extraordinary new benchmark: detecting the light of a star that existed within the first billion years after the Universe’s birth in the Big Bang (at a redshift of 6.2) — the most distant individual star ever seen. This sets up a major target for the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope in its first year.
This find is a huge leap back in time compared to the previous single-star record holder; detected by Hubble in 2018. That star existed when the universe was about 4 billion years old, or 30 percent of its current age, at a time that astronomers refer to as “redshift 1.5.” Scientists use the word “redshift” because as the Universe expands, light from distant objects is stretched or “shifted” to longer, redder wavelengths as it travels toward us.
But the newly detected star is so far away that its light has taken 12.9 billion years to reach Earth, appearing to us as it did when the universe was only 7 percent of its current age, at redshift 6.2. The smallest objects previously seen at such a great distance are clusters of stars, embedded inside early galaxies.
“We almost didn’t believe it at first, it was so much farther than the previous most distant, highest redshift star,” said astronomer Brian Welch of the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, lead author of the paper describing the discovery, which is published in the journal Nature. The discovery was made from data collected during Hubble’s RELICS (Reionization Lensing Cluster Survey) program, led by co-author Dan Coe at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI).
“Normally at these distances, entire galaxies look like small smudges, the light from millions of stars blending together,” said Welch. “The galaxy hosting this star has been magnified and distorted by gravitational lensing into a long crescent that we named the Sunrise Arc.” After studying the galaxy in detail, Welch determined that one feature is an extremely magnified star that he called Earendel, which means “morning star” in Old English. The discovery holds the promise of opening up an uncharted era of very early star formation.
“Earendel existed so long ago that it may not have had all the same raw materials as the stars around us today,” Welch explained. “Studying Earendel will be a window onto an era of the Universe that we are unfamiliar with, but that led to everything we do know. It’s like we’ve been reading a really interesting book, but we started with the second chapter, and now we will have a chance to see how it all got started,” Welch said.
“There’s a long-standing theoretical prediction that stars that form solely out of the elements that were forged shortly after the Big Bang — hydrogen, helium and trace amounts of lithium — should be more massive than the stars that form today,” added team member Erik Zackrisson, of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Uppsala University in Sweden. “These primordial stars, known as Population III stars, have so far eluded observers, but could be rendered detectable if subject to very high magnification by gravitational lensing, as in the case of the Earendel object.”
The research team estimates that Earendel is at least 50 times the mass of our Sun and millions of times as bright, rivalling the most massive stars known. But even such a brilliant, very high-mass star would be impossible to see at such a great distance without the aid of natural magnification by a huge galaxy cluster, in this case known as WHL0137-08, sitting between us and Earendel. The mass of the galaxy cluster warps the fabric of space, creating a powerful natural magnifying glass that distorts and greatly amplifies the light from distant objects behind it.
Thanks to the rare alignment with the magnifying galaxy cluster, the star Earendel appears directly on, or extremely close to, a ripple in the fabric of space. This ripple, which is known in optics as a “caustic,” provides maximum magnification and brightening. The effect is analogous to the rippled surface of a swimming pool creating patterns of bright light on the bottom of the pool on a sunny day. The ripples on the surface act as lenses and focus sunlight to maximum brightness on the pool floor.
This caustic causes the star Earendel to pop out from the general glow of its home galaxy. Its brightness is magnified a thousandfold or more. At this point astronomers are not able to determine whether Earendel is a binary star, but most massive stars do have at least one smaller companion star.
Astronomers expect that Earendel will remain highly magnified for years to come. It will be observed by the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope [1] later in 2022 [2]. Webb’s high sensitivity to infrared light is needed to learn more about Earendel, because its light is stretched (redshifted) to longer infrared wavelengths by the expansion of the Universe.
“Webb’s images and spectra will allow us to confirm that Earendel is indeed a star, and to constrain its age, temperature, mass and radius,” explained team member Jose Maria Diego of the Instituto de Física de Cantabria in Spain. “Combining observations from Hubble and Webb will allow us to also learn about microlenses in the galaxy cluster, which could include exotic objects like primordial black holes.”
Earendel’s composition will be of great interest to astronomers, because it formed before the Universe was filled with the heavy elements produced by successive generations of massive stars. If follow-up studies find that Earendel is only made of primordial hydrogen and helium, it would be the first evidence for the legendary Population III stars, which are hypothesised to be the very first stars to form after the Big Bang. While the probability is small, Welch admits it is enticing all the same.
“With Webb, we may see stars even more distant than Earendel, which would be incredibly exciting,” Welch said. “We’ll go as far back as we can. I would love to see Webb break Earendel’s distance record.”
Notes
[1] Launched in December 2021 on an Ariane 5 rocket from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana, Webb is designed and built to offer scientists the capabilities needed to push the frontiers of knowledge in many areas of astronomy. This includes research on our own Solar System, the formation of stars and planets (including planets outside our Solar System — exoplanets), and on how galaxies are formed and evolve, in ways never before possible. The James Webb Space Telescope is an international project led by NASA in partnership with ESA and the Canadian Space Agency. You can stay up to date on ESA/Webb updates here.
[2] Earendel will be observed with the James Webb Space Telescope as part of the observing programme #2282.
More information
The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA.
The international team of astronomers who carried out this study consists of B. Welch, D. Coe, J. M. Diego, A. Zitrin, E. Zackrisson, P. Dimauro, Y. Jimenez-Teja, P. Kelly, G. Mahler, M. Oguri, F. X. Timmes, R. Windhorst, M. Florian, S. E. de Mink, R. J. Avila, J. Anderson, L. Bradley, K. Sharon, A. Vikaeus, S. McCandliss, M. Bradac, J. Rigby, B. Frye, S. Toft, V. Strait, M. Trenti, S. Sharma. F. Andrade-Santos, T. Broadhurst.
Image credit: NASA, ESA, B. Welch (JHU), D. Coe (STScI), A. Pagan (STScI)
Release Date: March 30, 2022
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