Astronomers have called into question the identity of the most distant star in the universe ever detected, Earendel, first spotted by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope in 2022. New research using the agency's James Webb Space Telescope suggests this far-flung light source, located 12.9 billion light-years away in the Sunrise Arc galaxy, may actually be a tightly packed star cluster rather than a single star, reports Live Science.
Earendel, whose name means "morning star" in Old English, was initially thought to have formed just 900 million years after the big bang. Its discovery relied on what Mashable calls a "quirk of nature"—gravitational lensing, a phenomenon in which a massive galaxy cluster between Earth and Earendel bent and magnified the distant light, making it visible to telescopes. This lensing effect increased Earendel's apparent size more than 4,000-fold.
Lead study author Massimo Pascale and his team used the JWST's spectroscopic data to compare Earendel's light signature with those of known globular clusters. The findings show similarities, making the star cluster scenario plausible. However, some experts remain cautious. Brian Welch, who led the original Hubble discovery but wasn't involved in the new study, said the JWST data alone can't definitively distinguish between a single star and a cluster at this distance, as their light patterns can appear nearly identical.
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The research team focused on the cluster hypothesis and didn't systematically rule out other possibilities, such as Earendel being a smaller multistar system. Both Pascale and Welch agree that observing microlensing events—brief changes in brightness when closer objects pass in front—could help resolve Earendel's true nature.
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