[ INSIDE THE IMAGE // HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE ]
[Earendel]
What we're looking at here is an image from the Hubble Space
Telescope of the Sunrise Arc, which is this long
red banana that you can see on the screen, right there.
And then what's highlighted by that white arrow is the lensed star
Earendel, which is the most distant star that's been observed so far.
So we're seeing this entire galaxy as it was about 13 billion years ago.
This particular discovery was thanks to gravitational lensing.
So what you can kind of see
in the background here with all these sort of yellowish galaxies,
those are all galaxies that are part of a galaxy cluster.
And this galaxy cluster is
a very massive object that actually bends the spacetime around it.
And as the light from this distant galaxy passes through that distorted spacetime,
it gets magnified.
And stretched out into this long arc that we see.
Because of exactly where all these galaxies are
there is a peak right here, right on this point,
where the magnification starts to skyrocket,
so it starts to become an incredibly high magnification just right in that spot.
And that's how we able to to see this one star.
The original image looks like this.
So this is where you can see, you know, all of these sort of fuzzy
yellow galaxies around here form a pretty clear cluster.
You can still
kind of see this faint red arc down here at the bottom.
And that was what piqued our interest originally.
Anything that's that red is going to be at a very high redshift,
which means it's very early in the universe.
So that was kind of why we first got interested.
You can also see just kind of how long this object is.
So this is the longest lensed arc that we've seen at a redshift six or above.
So that's within the first billion years of the universe.
And it kind of opens the door to looking at the very first generation of stars.
So, the very first stars would form, you know, a few hundred
million years, maybe 1 to 300 million years after the Big Bang.
It's kind of that ballpark.
So this kind of gives us a foot in that door.
That gives us a really good chance to continue to discover
more of these objects and,
you know, hopefully push that boundary a little bit further
and really get a chance to to find one of the very first generation stars.
Image of Earendel -WHL0137-LS. Hundreds of galaxies in the image with a box callout of the sunrise arc with a white arrow pointing to Earendel.
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