Aug. 3 (UPI) — The most distant star known to exist in the universe has been spotted by the James Webb Telescope. It comes just months after scientists using the Hubble Space Telescope announced the star’s existence. Earendel, named after a “Lord of The Rings” character, was discovered using Hubble’s gravitational capability. The star is 12.9 billion light-years from Earth, the most distant object ever recorded, according to NASA. Gravitational lensing extends the reach of telescopes by detecting objects through bent light from objects behind black holes. When bent light passes through black holes, the light behaves as if it were passing through a telescope lens. An image of the star, as seen by the James Webb Telescope, was released Tuesday by a team of astronomers at Cosmic Spring JWST. JWST is the most powerful telescope ever launched into space and uses infrared technology to view objects farther from Earth than previously possible. “JWST was designed to study the first stars. Until recently, we assumed that meant star populations within the first galaxies,” astronomers from the Space Telescope Science Institute in Maryland wrote. “But in the last three years, three single strongly lensed stars have been discovered.” The astronomers said this “offers new hope for direct observation of individual stars at cosmological distances”. JWST was designed to look at the first galaxies that formed in the first hundreds of millions of years after the Big Bang. Earendel, known as WHL0137-LS, is located in the constellation Cetus. It is not visible to the naked eye.
