Farthest star ever captured by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope?
Named Earendel, which means Morning Star, the massive star burns twice as hot as the Sun and is about a million times more luminous

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New images of the farthest star ever detected have been captured by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope.
Named Earendel, which means Morning Star, the massive B-type star burns twice as hot as the Sun and is about a million times more luminous, according to the space agency.
The star, which was first detected by the Hubble Space Telescope last year, is believed to have originated within the first billion years of the universe’s existence.
NASA says the star was captured with the aid of gravitational lensing, a quirk that occurs when a massive celestial body, in this case, the galaxy cluster WHL0137-08, causes a curvature of space-time and produces a magnifying effect, allowing astronomers to peer through the cluster.
In the image released by NASA, Earendel is shown as a reddish dot within the Sunrise Arc galaxy, below a larger diffraction spike in the 5 o’clock position.
A hundred times more powerful than the Hubble telescope, Webb was able to capture the star’s colours for the first time. Astronomers also believe they captured a previously undetected companion star for Earendel.
“Based solely on the colours of Earendel, astronomers think they see hints of a cooler, redder companion star. This light has been stretched by the expansion of the universe to wavelengths longer than Hubble’s instruments can detect, and so was only detectable with Webb,” NASA said in a statement.
The Webb, which launched in December 2021 after 30 years of development, also captured other notable details in the Sunrise Arc, the most highly magnified galaxy detected in the universe’s first billion years.
These include both young star-forming regions and older established star clusters, including one cluster that’s estimated to be at least 10 million years old.
Astronomers believe the cluster is?likely to persist until the present day and sheds light on how clusters in the Milky Way might have looked when they formed 13 billion years ago.
NASA says the discoveries have “opened a new realm of the universe to stellar physics, and new subject matter to scientists studying the early universe.”
Astronomers are?analyzing data from Webb’s Near-Infrared Spectrograph instrument observations to establish precise composition and distance measurements for Earendel and the Sunrise Arc galaxy.
Before Earendel was captured, astronomers previously observed distant stars around 3 and 4 billion years after the big bang. The latest discovery could?be a step toward the eventual detection of the first generation of stars, according to NASA.
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