NASA's James Webb Space Telescope captured an image of the most distant known star in the universe. The star named Earendel, after a character in J.R.R. Tolkien's 'Lord of the Rings' prequel 'The Silmarillion' is almost 28 billion light-years away from Earth.
That is over 10 billion light-years more distant than the next-furthest star astronomers have seen. At such enormous distances, experts can usually only make out entire galaxies, but a lucky coincidence allowed them to spot Earendel with the Hubble Space Telescope and then observe it again with Webb on July 30.
By comparing the Hubble image with that captured by NASA's new $10 billion (£7.4 billion) super space telescope, experts were able to find the elusive Earendel as a faint red dot below a cluster of distant galaxies.
The star, whose light took 12.9 billion light-years to reach Earth, is so faint that it would be challenging to find without the help of Hubble — which images in visible, ultraviolet light compared to Webb's infrared.
This example of the two telescopes working side-by-side is exactly what NASA had envisioned, despite Webb ultimately being seen as the successor to the famous Hubble. 'We're excited to share the first JWST image of Earendel, the most distant star known in our universe, lensed and magnified by a massive galaxy cluster,' said a group of astronomers using the Twitter account Cosmic Spring JWST.
Their tweet refers to gravitational lensing, where light has been stretched into a long curve by the gravity of a galaxy cluster closer to Earth. This process magnified the Sunrise Arc galaxy where Earendel resides by a factor of more than 1,000, allowing astronomers to confirm with Webb that it is an individual star and not a cluster of hundreds.
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