By RYOMA KOMIYAMA/ Staff Writer
March 31, 2022 at 18:50 JST
The arrow points to Earendel, the most distant star ever discovered. (Provided by NASA, others)
With a bit of cosmic luck, an international team of researchers discovered the most distant star ever, located about 12.9 billion light-years from Earth.
That finding broke the previous record by around 4 billion light-years.
The results of the research were released in the March 30 edition of the scientific journal Nature and can be accessed at (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04449-y).
The team members included Masamune Oguri, a professor of space physics at the Center for Frontier Science of Chiba University, and researchers from Johns Hopkins University of the United States.
They analyzed an image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope of a galaxy cluster in the general direction of the Cetus constellation, and found a star 1 million times brighter than the sun and 50 times heavier.
The team dubbed the star “Earendel,” an Old English term meaning “morning star.”
The researchers caught a break with gravitational lensing, which occurs when light is bent by mass, in this case, the gravity of dark matter right in front of the star.
Gravitational lensing made the star appear much brighter than it actually is and allowed the team to find it.
Oguri had used a similar method in the past to discover a star about 9 billion light years away.
He expressed hope that the Hubble successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, would provide additional information about the differences between stars born just after the Big Bang and those currently observable.
Earendel is believed to have been born about 900 million years after the Big Bang created the universe.
“It is believed that stars that emerged just after the Big Bang are made up of different chemical elements than today’s stars,” Oguri said. “I want to use the James Webb Space Telescope to confirm the exact differences in order to study how space evolved.”
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