This morning history was made. After a campaign of expectation that took weeks, Nasa announced in the morning that the Hubble Space Telescope, which has been exploring the universe for more than 30 years, had detected the most distant star ever seen by humanity and, therefore, the oldest.
It is as if technology had traveled back in time to the past, one in which no human and no animal was alive, not even their idea or possibility: 12.9 billion years ago, the time it took for light to reach this point. U.S. It is a star from the first billion years following the Big Bang, since the universe is known to be 13.8 billion years old, which indicates, according to Lauren Flor, an astrophysicist who studies exoplanet host stars, that it existed when the universe was only 7% of your current age.
The incredible thing is that it was not the telescope that traveled, but the light of the same star that manifested itself. It was a work between the star, Hubble, the galaxy cluster and a fluke: gravitational lensing.
The result is a star they named Eärendel, which means “morning star” in Old English, which is 50 times more massive and two million times brighter in UV light than our Sun and was a discovery of the Relics program, Hubble’s Reionization Lensing Cluster Survey, led by co-author Dan Coe at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), Baltimore.
Because it is important?
It’s a record, a jump in time. In fact, it’s called the “morning star” because it happened right at the dawn of the universe. The light from the farthest star found before Eärendel, also detected by Hubble in 2018, was only 4 billion years old, which represents only 30% of the current age of the universe, 13,800 years.
But, more than the record, it is the possibility that it brings with it: an opportunity to learn more regarding the unexplored beginnings, regarding the training, the early age, bearing in mind that we are used to knowing, above all, the stars within the Milky Way, our galaxy, as explained by Luz Ángela García, a researcher at the ECCI University, because “those from outside are not so much within our reach because the brightness is overshadowed by that of the galaxies”.
And Eärendel likely didn’t have the same raw materials as the stars around us today, the Hubble researchers say, so learning regarding its composition will be key, because it formed before the universe filled up with the heavy elements. produced by successive generations of massive stars.
Finally, according to Pablo Cuartas Restrepo, professor of Planetary Sciences in the Astronomy undergraduate program at the University of Antioquia, it will allow us to know which came first, the chicken or the egg, the stars or the galaxies: “We still do not understand these early stages very well. evolution of the universe, in which very large stars were formed. This discovery will help cosmologists better understand these early stages of the universe and its structure.”
How was it possible to see it?
A telescope can detect light as old or older than this, but it would be the light of entire galaxies. This is the first time that of an individual object has been captured. How was it possible, especially with Hubble, an already old telescope regarding to retire? It was a gravitational lens.
García explains it this way: “We have Hubble and a cluster of galaxies, behind which is the star. That bunch of galaxies has so many masses, it’s so massive, that they can distort space-time. The star’s light, also very bright, is deflected, distorted and magnified by this cluster of galaxies, which allows the distance it has traveled to be seen and captured by the telescope.
In other words, Flor explains that “light bends near a mass concentration, but in this case, it is a huge mass”, as it was the galaxy cluster WHL0137-08 located between Hubble and Eärendel. “It’s like having a curved glass that deforms the image when we look through it, you can do the test with a bottle.” The gravitational lens, that cluster of galaxies, amplified the image and gave us, yesterday, the historical news.
The most exciting thing is knowing that this is just beginning because the James Webb is regarding to start operations.
Just a mouth opener for the James Webb
