Arendelle (pointed with arrow) is located in space-time along a wave that gives it extreme magnification, allowing it to be seen from its host galaxy, which appears as a red spot across the sky.
NASA, ESA, Brian Welch, Dan Coe
On Wednesday, NASA announced a discovery that our brains can barely comprehend.
The Hubble Space Telescope spotted a star that is at least 50 times the mass of our Sun, several million times brighter and so deep in space that it took 12.9 billion years for its light to reach Earth. It was born at a time when the universe was only 7 percent of its current age and floats 28 billion light-years away from the present, accounting for the continual expansion of the universe.
This shining Leviathan is the most distant, oldest single star ever observed by mankind.
And after some deliberation, scientists gave the cosmic artifact a touching name: Arendelle, which means “morning star” in Old English.
“The study of Arendelle will be a window into an era of the universe we are unfamiliar with, but it led to everything we know,” astronomer Brian Welch of Johns Hopkins University said in a statement. Welch is lead author of a paper published Wednesday in the journal Nature that describes Arendelle’s discovery.
But before we move on to how this particular star came into our line of sight, and what it can tell us about our past, let’s put Arendelle in the perspective of our mortal mind.
Our Sun is 109 times the size of Earth, and Arendelle is 50 to 500 times larger than that. Our Sun is about 93 million miles (149,669,000 km) from us, yet despite such a distance, it is the only lightbulb to illuminate our entire globe. Yearendel is millions of times brighter than our sun.
A size comparison of the Earth and the Sun. very nice.
NASA
And finally, the previous distance-record-holding star, called Icarus and located by Hubble in 2018, came into existence when the universe was at about 30 percent of its current age; It took 9 billion years for the light of Icarus to reach us. Arendelle is even (much) more ancient and remote than that.
With Arendelle, we are looking at light that originated just after the Big Bang photons that traveled for many millennia to reach the human eye.
“As we look across the universe, we also look back in time, so these extremely high-resolution observations allow us to understand the building blocks of some of the first galaxies,” Victoria Strait, an astronomer at the Cosmic Dawn Center in Copenhagen, said. and study co-authors said in a statement.
Welch offered a metaphor: “It sounds like we’re reading a really interesting book, but we started with the second chapter, and now we’ll have a chance to see how it all began.”
Photographing a star 28 billion light years away
It sounds like a proverb.
For Hubble to track Arendelle, the multitude of distant galaxies needed to perfectly align and warp the fabric of space and time with ultra-high precision.
“Normally, at these distances, entire galaxies look like tiny specks of light from millions of stars blending together,” Welch explained. So the team was surprised to see a star, Arendelle, sticking out. But Arendelle was there thanks to a fascinating phenomenon called gravitational lensing. In short, here he is.
According to Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity, space and time are connected as a kind of fabric. Super massive objects in this fabric, such as planets or black holes, form or warp it inward. Imagine placing a fifty-pound weight on a trampoline; The trampoline will turn inward and form a curve. It’s the same idea.
An illustration showing how the warp of space and time changes. However, keep in mind, this is a 2D image. In fact, it happens in higher dimensions, which are really hard for our brains to understand.
NASA/ESA/A. Field and L. Handicap (STScI)
And the bigger the object, the bigger the curve. That’s why black holes are known as the cream of the war crop. But regardless, the universe is filled with a bunch of these curves because there are so many massive objects in it, and smaller objects fall along those curves.
For example, humans are probably hooked on the Earth because we’re falling along the curve of the Earth – in terms of the trampoline analogy, we’re like a one-pound weight falling along the curve of a fifty-pound weight. Einstein’s theory says that this falling-decreasing-curve concept is what we perceive as gravity, but returning to Arendelle’s miracle, these curves sometimes mess with our view of outer space.
Basically, when the most massive cosmic bodies come together, a.k.a. galaxy clusters, which contain billions of stars and many black holes, a massive war also takes place. This crazy warp is strong enough to affect the surrounding light, causing it to distort and magnify the brightness of nearby cosmic objects.
With only the human eye and a telescope, even like Hubble, these objects are too distant or blurry to see, but once the light illuminating them is driven through the cluster curve, they are in focus. come. It’s called gravitational lensing, and that’s how Welch and fellow researchers observed Arendelle.
“The galaxy hosting this star has been enlarged and distorted by gravitational lensing into a long crescent that we have named the Sunrise Arc,” Welch said.
A close-up view of Arendelle.
NASA, ESA, Brian Welch, Dan Coe
But perhaps most surprising of the discovery is that every galaxy cluster in Arendelle’s path orients itself in such a way as to distort the light of a single star and stick it into the Sunrise arc.,
NASA called it a stroke of luck.
NASA’s James Webb Telescope Will Study Arendelle
Looking to the future, Arendelle is the perfect subject for NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, which launched late last year and is the agency’s groundbreaking effort to image the universe as they appear right after the Big Bang. were after. It is designed to examine the universe over vast timescales.
The machine is equipped with a highly specialized toolkit that can detect photons from light-years to light-years away, scan for potential alien life in deep space, elucidate the origins of black holes and, in contextually for Arendelle, can probe extremely old stars. Unprecedented detail.
“With James Webb, we will be able to confirm that Arendelle is really just a star, and at the same time determine what kind of star it is,” said professor at the Niels Bohr Institute and of the Cosmic Dawn Center. Leader heard Toft said. said in a statement. Toft participated in the Earendael study.
The James Webb Space Telescope in an artist’s rendering.
NASA GSFC/CIL/Adriana Manrique Gutierrez
Webb’s instruments may also shed light on the chemical composition of Arendelle, which, according to the researchers, may be the biggest deal of all.
At the time Arendelle was born, the research team says, the universe was not yet filled with the regular set of heavy elements that give rise to stars close to us young stars. “Arendelle may be the first known example of an early generation of stars in the universe,” Toft said, and “it would suggest that Arendelle is a rare, massive metal-poor star,” said Dan Coe, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. and study co-authors said in a statement.
But in the grand scheme of things, the web may be a step ahead.
If you remember, when the telescope exploded, it took the world by surprise as it set out to answer questions we’d never have thought to ask and to find objects that could We would have never even dreamed. “With Webb, we can see stars even further away from Arendelle, which would be incredibly exciting,” Welch said. “We’ll back down as much as we can.
“I would love to see Webb break Arendelle’s distance record.”
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