- NASA's James Webb Space Telescope captured a new image of the farthest star ever detected.
- The star, nicknamed Earendel, is twice as hot as the sun and about 28 billion light-years away from Earth.
- It appears as a reddish dot within the Sunrise Arc galaxy.
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope captured a new image revealing the colors of Earendel, the farthest star ever detected.
Earendel was first discovered by the Hubble Space Telescope last year. It's more than twice as hot as the sun, and "about a million times more luminous," NASA said in a press release last week.
Earendel is not the bright spot with blue diffraction spikes at the center of the image.
The star actually appears as a reddish dot in the Sunrise Arc galaxy, which is a long, curved, red trail appearing below the diffraction spike that's in the 5 o'clock position.
Earendel is so far away that its light has taken billions of years to reach Earth. As a result, Webb's image shows the star as it was 1 billion years after the Big Bang — so about 12.9 billion years ago.
Because the universe has been expanding ever since then, the star is currently about 28 billion light-years away from Earth, according to Space.com.
That expansion has also stretched much of the light from Earendel to wavelengths that are too long for Hubble's instruments to detect. Webb is 100 times more powerful than Hubble, though, and it captured previously unseen colors of the distant star.
Those colors reveal that being the farthest star we've ever detected does not make Earendel lonely — scientists believe it has a companion star beside it.
Stars as massive as Earendel do typically have companions, but Hubble was unable to detect one for Earendel. Thanks to the Webb Telescope's powerful infrared vision, though, scientists believe they can see, for the first time, a "cooler, redder companion star" beside Earendel.
Webb's keen eye also revealed new star clusters and star-forming regions within the Sunrise Arc.
Before Earendel, the most distant star was observed 4 billion years after the Big Bang. This previous record-holder was also detected by Hubble. In Earendel's case, it helps that the gravity from a massive cluster of galaxies is magnifying our view of the star.
Eventually, according to NASA, researchers hope to peer so far back through space and time that they detect a star from the very first generation of stars in the universe — stars that synthesized hydrogen and helium into heavier elements that went on to populate planets and ultimately led to the emergence of life on Earth.