A lucky cosmic alignment has revealed a single source of light in the first billion years after the big bang, setting up a major confirmation for the James Webb Space Telescope in its rookie year.
Even NASA's powerful Hubble Space Telescope can benefit from some assistance, as evidenced in its latest discovery: a record-breaking star so distant that a combination of the telescope's sophisticated instrumentation and nature's natural magnifying glass was needed to spot it. The star, nicknamed Earendel by astronomers, emitted its light within the universe's first billion years. It's a significant leap beyond Hubble's previous distance record, in 2018, when it detected a star at around 4 billion years after the big bang. Hubble got a boost by looking through space warped by the mass of the huge galaxy cluster WHL0137-08, an effect called gravitational lensing. Earendel was aligned on or very near a ripple in the fabric of space created by the cluster's mass, which magnified its light enough to be detected by Hubble. NASA's James Webb Telescope will follow-up to learn about Earendel's brightness, temperature, and composition. While the chances are slim that Earendel is one of the universe's first-generation stars, astronomers are eager for its insights into the environment of the early universe.
Find additional articles, images, and videos at HubbleSite.org
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