One image shows the Earendel star as seen by the James Webb Space Telescope. Earendel is the most distant star ever seen, 12.9 billion light years from Earth. Photo courtesy of Cosmic Spring JWST/Twitter
Aug. 3 (UPI) — The most distant known star in the universe has been detected by the James Webb telescope. It comes just months after scientists using the Hubble Space Telescope announced the star’s existence.
Earendel, named after a “Lord of the Rings” character, was discovered using Hubble’s gravitational lensing capability. The star is 12.9 billion light-years from Earth, the most distant object ever recorded, according to NASA.
Gravitational lensing extends the range of telescopes by detecting objects through the bent light of objects behind black holes. When bent light passes through black holes, the light behaves as if it were passing through a telescope lens.
An image of the star, seen through the James Webb Telescope, was released Tuesday by a group of astronomers at Cosmic Spring JWST.
The JWST is the most powerful telescope ever launched into space and uses infrared technology to see objects farther from Earth than previously possible.
“JWST was designed to study the first stars. Until recently, we assumed that meant populations of stars within the first galaxies,” astronomers at the Maryland Space Telescope Science Institute wrote in a paper. “But in the last three years, three strongly slow individual stars have been discovered.”
The astronomers said this “offers new hope of directly observing individual stars at cosmological distances.”
The JWST was designed to see the first galaxies formed in the first hundreds of millions of years after the Big Bang.
Earendel, known as WHL0137-LS, is located in the constellation Cetus. It is not visible to the naked eye.