Yeah.
So we found an individual star, which is the most distant
individual star that has been found thus far.
So normally when we look at very distant objects,
what we're seeing is the light from an entire galaxy.
So millions of stars all blended together,
and we've been able to see those out to even farther distances.
But in this case, thanks to a very massive cluster of galaxies in the foreground,
the light from this one star has just been very, very highly magnified.
So we're able to see this single star
at a much greater distance.
So it's when the universe was less than 1 billion years old.
So we're looking nearly 13 billion years into the past
when we look at this object
Yeah.
So it's thanks to two things, really.
So we have, first of all, the incredible power of the Hubble Space Telescope
that's something that you really need to be able to see something like this
and then combine that with an additional telescope in space.
So through something called gravitation lensing,
a very massive
cluster of galaxies actually bends the light from the background object.
And in doing so, just like looking through a glass lens,
it focuses the light onto our telescope.
And in this case, we get just the right alignment
with the lens and with the star in the background
that we get really, really high magnifications.
So in this case, it's magnified by a factor of thousands.
Whereas typically, you know, if you have a lensed galaxy,
it would be magnified by a factor of a few to perhaps ten.
So in this case, we just got really lucky with the alignment.
So we can really see very small details
in this background object
I think the most interesting thing is that it's looking back to a time
when the universe was much different than what it is today. So
what we've seen of
galaxies at this early time, we can tell that they're structured very differently
and that they look quite a bit different than galaxies that we see nearby.
For example, the Milky Way and our nearest neighbor, Andromeda,
So it stands to reason that stars
at such a great distance will look a little bit different, too.
And we just haven't had the opportunity to really study one in detail yet.
So I think what I'm most interested in and what I'm most excited by is the fact
that we now have an opportunity to really pinpoint one object
and look at it in detail.
Yeah, Hubble and Webb are very complementary.
So Hubble obviously gets the shorter wavelengths of light,
and Webb is able to target longer wavelengths.
So when you combine those, you get a much broader understanding of
whatever objects we're looking at.
In my case as well,
my group has both Hubble and Webb observations scheduled at the same time.
So we're going to be able to get
Hubble observations of this lensed star
and Webb observations over a similar time period within the next year or so.
So we'll will very much so be using the data from both of them together.
And that's going to make our analysis of this
much more powerful
Yeah.
You can learn more from the NASA website.
So nasa.gov/Hubble, you can also follow
on social media @NASAHubble.
They also, especially on Instagram, have lots of pretty pictures
from the Hubble telescope.
That's one of my favorite accounts to follow
So right now we can constrain roughly
how bright it is and that can tell us about how massive it is.
So we can estimate with the existing Hubble data
that it's about 50 to 100 times the mass of the sun
We also know that
obviously it's at a time when the universe was less than a billion years old.
So we can infer that it's probably going to look a little bit different
than stars that we would see in the Milky Way, for example.
And this is something that we're planning to follow up with the James
Webb Space Telescope.
So with that, we'll be able to say more.
But right now we can tell that it's a very massive star and it's going to be
a very interesting object to continue to study
It is very likely no longer alive.
It is so massive.
Stars tend to live fast and die young,
and this one being 50 to 100 times
the mass of the sun, is absolutely living up to that.
So it would have a lifetime of a few hundred million years.
So it is most certainly no longer around today.
So it's
it's one of the few cases where the star that we're seeing is long dead.
By the time we're able to see it
So when we look back into the very distant
universe, into a time when the universe was less than a billion years old,
there's been much less time for stars to have lived and died and spread
the heavier elements that they form into the rest of the universe.
And so that means that this star is
much more likely to be
low metallicity, which means that there's not much else
besides hydrogen and helium,
and therefore, it's probably going to look quite a bit different than the stars
that we see today.
Like the sun.
In part, it ends up being much more massive because of that.
And it's since we know
that the universe at this time is quite a bit different than the universe today.
It's going to be very exciting to follow this up and get more information
about it.
Hubble's doing great.
It's obviously still making a lot of great discoveries,
and it's continuing to to pursue a wide array of science.
And we expect that it will continue to do well
and make awesome discoveries like this for years to come.
I would love to say
that there was a eureka moment, but it was really much more of a slow burn
It turned into a lot of double checking whether or not
we got our models right and trying to figure out if we did something wrong
to get such a high magnification
But once we did eventually
get to a point that we believed that this was really a star
at such a great distance, it was incredibly exciting.
And it was really fun to get to work on something like this
and to be part of this discovery
Yeah.
So the star is nicknamed Earendel, which is an old English word
that means the Morning Star
So the time period that we found the object
in within the first billion years is referred to generally as Cosmic Dawn.
So we found that a sort of
Morning Star kind of name fit very well.
It's also for the Lord of the Rings nerds out there.
It's the same old English word that Tolkien
used for inspiration for a character from the Silmarillion
who also ends up becoming a star.
So it's a nice parallel there
and we just we figured that The Morning Star
seemed to fit for such an early object
So I was kind of given a typical grad student
project of Here's some data, see what you can find
So we knew that the galaxy that this star is sitting
in was very highly magnified by the foreground
galaxy cluster, which is acts as the lens.
So we end up seeing the lensed galaxy
as this long banana shaped arc.
And we can tell from the just the first image
that it was longer than any lensed arc
at this distance that we had seen before.
So I was given the task of
figuring out what the galaxy looked like.
And in the process of that
and the process of figuring out how highly magnified it was, I
sort of stumbled on to the fact that this one part of it
seemed like it was at a very, very high magnification.
And the more that we looked into it, the more it became clear
that it was too small to be anything other than a star.
So that was how we sort of came to the conclusion that this is a lensed star.