The James Webb Space Telescope photographs the farthest known star: it is almost 13,000 million light years away

The James Webb Space Telescope does not stop sending us spectacular discoveries of the Universe in its observations. In one of his photographs, scientists have seen the farthest star from Earth that is known to date and that had already been captured by its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope. The star is named ‘Earendel’ in honor of a character from ‘The Silmarillon’, a prequel to The Lord of the Rings. It was first photographed thanks to gravitational lensing in a Hubble image, but now it’s not the only telescope to have done so. Earendel is located 12.9 billion light-years from Earth, so its light is quite difficult to detect. In fact, it is barely noticeable in the image captured by Webb, which was posted on Twitter last Tuesday, August 2. Luckily, a user named @nathanCsilva has made it easy to see the star in a tweet citing the full image. posted by Cosmic Spring JWST.”We are excited to share the first JWST image of Earendel, the most distant known star in our Universe, focused and magnified by a massive galaxy cluster,” the astronomers detailed in the initial tweet. According to a paper published by the Space Telescope Science Institute in Maryland, which operates with Webb and Hubble, the former was designed to study the earliest stars in the Universe. “Until recently we assumed that meant populations of stars within early galaxies,” the study said. “But in three years three single stars with strong lenses have been discovered. This offers new hope for directly observing single stars at cosmological distances.” .Sign up for our newsletter and receive the latest technology news in your email.