Webb Reveals Colors of Earendel, Most Distant Star Ever Detected
Discovered by Hubble, Earendel is the farthest star ever detected. It existed in the first billion years after the big bang! The James Webb Space Telescope now shows it to be a massive B-type star, more than twice as hot as our Sun and about a million times more luminous. It’s only detectable thanks to its alignment with a galaxy cluster between Earendel and us. The cluster’s gravity bends light, magnifying what is behind it — in the case of a star-sized object like Earendel, by a factor of at least 4000. Based on the colors of the light of Earendel, astronomers think it may have a cooler companion star.
Webb is also able to see other details in Earendel’s host galaxy, the Sunrise Arc — the most highly magnified galaxy yet detected in the universe’s first billion years. Those features include both young star-forming regions and older, established star clusters as small as 10 light-years across.
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has observed the well-known Ring Nebula in unprecedented detail. Formed by a star throwing off its outer layers as it runs out of fuel, the Ring Nebula is an archetypal planetary nebula. This new image from Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) shows intricate details of the filament structure of the inner ring. There are some 20,000 dense globules in the nebula, which are rich in molecular hydrogen. In contrast, the inner region shows very hot gas. The main shell contains a thin ring of enhanced emission from carbon-based molecules known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs).
Credit: ESA/Webb, NASA, CSA, M. Barlow (University College London), N. Cox (ACRI-ST), R. Wesson (Cardiff University)
