James Webb Space Telescope JWST Earendel Oldest Most Distant Star
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has captured Earendel, the oldest and most distant star observed yet in the universe. This star is actually named after a character in J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” prequel “The Silmarillion,” was found in a Hubble image with gravitational lensing. The light from this star took 12.9 billion light-years to reach Earth and requires an extremely powerful telescope to detect.



Gravitational lensing basically extends the range of telescopes by detecting objects through bent light from objects that are behind black holes. When this bent light passes by the black holes, it behaves as if the light were passing through the telescope lens. This got us thinking…now if AI was able to boost Roundhay Garden Scene, the oldest known film, to 60FPS we can only imagine what it can do with these JWST images.

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JWST was designed to study the first stars. Until recently, we assumed that meant populations of stars within the first galaxies. But in the past three years, three individual strongly lensed stars have been discovered,” said astronomers from the Space Telescope Science Institute in Maryland.

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