VIEW GALLERY – 3 IMAGES The Hubble image. The star is called Earendel, named after a character in JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings prequel book The Silmarillion. The half-elf character in the book carries a jewel called the “Silmaril” across the sea, also called the morning star, which translates in Old English to the dawn star. As for the star itself, Earendil was found through gravitational lensing from observations by the Hubble Space Telescope, and its 12.9 billion light-years from Earth, making it the most distant star ever observed. Follow-up observations of Earendel were recently conducted by astronomers using JWST data, which is simply night and day compared to the images produced by Hubble. The JWST observations provided a much closer view of the star, giving astronomers and researchers a much more detailed picture. In a recent paper, astronomers from the Space Telescope Science Institute in Maryland wrote that JWST was designed to look at the first stars, but astronomers believed that the observations would be stars in groups rather than individually. JWST image. “JWST was designed to study the first stars. Until recently, we assumed this meant star populations in the first galaxies. But in the past three years, three single stars have been discovered with strong lensing. This offers a new hope for direct observation of individual stars in cosmological distances with JWST,” the Space Telescope Science Institute astronomers wrote. Like Connor Jak joined the TweakTown team in 2017 and has since reviewed 100 new tech products and keeps us up to date with the latest science and space news every day. Jak’s love for science, space and technology, and more specifically PC gaming, started at the age of 10. It was the day his father showed him how to play Age of Empires on an old Compaq computer. From that day, Jak fell in love with games and the advancement of the technology industry in all its forms. Instead of typical FPS, Jak holds a very special place in his heart for RTS games.
