Earendel started shining just 900 million years after the Big Bang and is only observable because of an extraordinary cosmic coincidence.
One of the great challenges for astronomers is to understand when the first stars formed and what they were like. They already have some clues.
Now the James Webb Space Telescope has photographed a star that began shining just 900 million years after the Big Bang. The images improve on those taken earlier this year by the Hubble Space Telescope, which discovered this ancient object, and provide astronomers with their first glimpse of a star from this early period of the universe.Astronomers call this ancient star Earendel, a word derived from Old English meaning “rising light”.
This gravitational lensing effect makes Earendel’s host galaxy appear as a smear of light across the distant universe — astronomers have named it the Sunrise Arc. The arc contains bright knots of light along its length and one of these knots is Earendel. The team say that the photometry suggests Earendel has a surface temperature of between 13000 and 16000 Kelvin. This in turn suggests the star is a giant hydrogen-burning B-type star with a mass somewhere between 20 and 200 times that of the sun.However, the team also say that Earendel could be a binary system and that various combinations of stars could better fit the observed data. Indeed, the best fit is a combination of a luminous cool star and a hot companion.
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