NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope used its NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) instrument to observe Earendel, the most distant star ever detected. Astronomers discovered that the star is actually a gargantuan B-type star more than twice as hot as our Sun, and about a million times more luminous.
It’s located in the Sunrise Arc galaxy and was only detected using the combined power of human technology as well as gravitational lensing. The Hubble Space Telescope and James Webb Space Telescope were both able to detect Earendel due to its lucky alignment behind a wrinkle in space-time created by the massive galaxy cluster WHL0137-08. This cluster is large that it warps the fabric of space itself, producing a magnifying effect.
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Astronomers are currently analyzing data from Webb’s NIRSpec (Near-Infrared Spectrograph) instrument observations of the Sunrise Arc galaxy and Earendel, which will provide precise composition and distance measurements for the galaxy. Since Hubble’s discovery of Earendel, Webb has detected other very distant stars using this technique, though none quite as far as Earendel. The discoveries have opened a new realm of the universe to stellar physics, and new subject matter to scientists studying the early universe,” said NASA.
