We’ve been writing for the last few days about the new image of the Ring Nebula (Messier 57) taken by the James Webb Space Telescope. This planetary nebula is relatively close to Earth, only about 2,000 light-years away. Instead, that is much further away Star Earendel first sighted by the Hubble Space Telescope in early 2022 JWST extension had already collected some data on this particular space object, which is located at ca 12.9 billion light years and now there are new considerations.
The study of stars found in the early Universe, such as Earendel It is important to understand what the cosmos looked like then and how it has evolved to date (and what might become of it in the future). A look back into the past that allows scientists to understand the present and make hypotheses about the future. This is the result of the latest publications.
The James Webb Space Telescope and the Earendel Star
As NASA jointly reported, ESA and CSA thanks to the data collected on July 30, 2022 and January 1, 2023 NIRCam instrument (near infrared) that was calculated Earendel It is a type B star, producing twice as much heat as the Sun and about a million times as bright.
It is possible to observe some of the properties of thanks to a gravitational lensing produced by the galaxy cluster WHL0137-08 (which stands between the star and Earth). Earendel which would otherwise be invisible to both HST and others JWST extension. After all, the star is very far from Earth and the light we are now receiving has disappeared a billion years after the Big Bang.
Click on the image to enlarge it
That’s what the astronomers expected Earendel had a companion star, which is quite common, but had escaped so far. Although it cannot be directly detected even with that James Webb Space Telescope Star color observations suggest there is a smaller, cooler companion star orbiting the larger, hotter one. The redshift It’s so powerful that Hubble couldn’t detect it, but JWST may have the right tools designed specifically for infrared.
To capture the image as a whole, the F090W, F115W, F150W, F200W, F277W, F356W, F410M and F444W filters were used, opening up a wide range of data processing possibilities. With Earendel Particular attention was paid to the structure sunrise arch.
This is a galaxy (where Earendel resides) that is always gravitationally lensed and is most magnified in the early Universe (always about a billion years after the Big Bang). The researchers found regions of star formation less than 5 million years old, as well as areas of older stars estimated to be at least 10 million years old. All within a diameter of just 10 light years.
Thanks to the data provided by NIRS spec (a spectrograph) it will be possible to determine the composition elements of this galaxy and star and estimate their age better than was possible with NIRCam. We are only at the beginning of exploring the early Universe and there is still much to discover and understand. ESA has now made the high-resolution image available about 60MB of the observed sky area.
