Hubble observes extremely distant 'Morning star' more than 50 times the mass of the sun
Science and Technology Daily, Beijing, March 30 (Reporter Zhang Mengran) The British "Nature" magazine reported on the 30th the Hubble Space Telescope's observations of an extremely distant single star or star system, which is about 900 million years after the Big Bang.
The discovery is much further out than past observations of similar systems and is quite early in the evolution of the universe.
The object, described by Johns Hopkins University astronomer Brian Welch and his colleagues, is nicknamed "Earendel," after an object that means "morning star" or "rising one." The Old English word for "light".
The researchers used gravitational lensing, a phenomenon in which a distant object is magnified by a closer one, to reveal that the star may be a single or binary star system.
The research team reports that Erendil has an estimated mass more than 50 times that of the Sun and a calculated redshift of 6.2.
Redshift, the degree to which light is "stretched" as it travels, can be used to infer distances to celestial objects; the higher the number, the further away (or earlier in cosmic history) the object is.
In the past, scientists observed that the redshift of magnified single stars is small, about 1-1.5.
The exact details of the star's temperature, mass and spectral properties are unknown, and researchers hope that the James Webb Telescope may provide this information in the future.