The duo of James Webb and Hubble – two space telescopes primarily operated by NASA – has successfully captured the image of a record-age star traveling through time, appearing as a ghost.
This is a large blue star that was born nearly 13 billion years ago. The radiant light from it, the scant remnants of ancient photons, has traveled through a warped region of the universe due to expansion and the gravitational wells of many younger stars and galaxies, finally reaching Earth.
The mysterious light is the “ghost” of the ancient star – (Photo: JAMES WEBB)
According to Science Alert, earlier this year, part of this light fell into the lens of the Hubble Space Telescope. Recently, scientists continued to examine this strange ghost with a more powerful telescope, the James Webb, from which they identified the owner of the “ghost.”
The star is named WHL0137-LS, or more commonly known as “Earende in the Tolkienesque region.” Earende is an ancient term referring to something radiant like the Morning Star, while Tolkienesque refers to stories reminiscent of the works of J. R. R. Tolkien, the creator of “The Lord of the Rings” and the Hobbit dwarves.
New images from James Webb show Earende appearing as a faint, twisted arc. This is not the star itself, but the ghost of the star, the light that took 13 billion years to reach Earth.
“This ghost” has traversed the challenging journey of a continuously expanding early universe, overcoming the gravitational pulls of other galaxies and stars on its path to reach the “eye of God” of Hubble and James Webb.
This star, belonging to the constellation Pisces, is believed to have formed about 900 million years after the Big Bang. It is not the first generation of stars in the universe, but it is still very ancient, appearing at a time when heavy elements were relatively scarce.
And this is also the oldest star that humanity has actually captured – even if it’s just a “ghost.”
