Earendel: JWST Suggests the Most Distant Star May Be a Star Cluster

The most distant object in the universe ever discovered, Earendel, might not in fact be a lone star as scientists initially assumed. It was spotted on 2022 by the Hubble Space Telescope and appeared to have evolved just 900 million years after the Big Bang, at a time when the universe was a mere infant. But fresh data from the newly launched James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) indicate that Earendel may not be a massive solitary star, but rather a small group of them — a star cluster.

How We Can See It

As per Live Science report , Earendel is located in the Etendeka galaxy of the Sunrise Arc, some 12.9 billion light-years from Earth. We can see it thanks to the effect of a special one known as gravitational lensing. The lensing occurs when a massive galaxy cluster warps and amplifies the light from objects situated much farther away. In this one, Earendel's light was 4,000 times as bright, shining in a way that astronomers would be able to catch it. Such rare alignments lead scientists to wonder if the object is actually more than a single star.

What JWST Found

Preliminary data from JWST had indicated that Earendel might be a very hot and massive star that was shining a million times as bright as the sun, and possibly was even one half of a pair of stars. But fresh spectroscopic data from JWST's NIRSpec instrument resemble the pattern we see in star clusters more closely. That means Earendel might actually consist of many stars burning in unison.

Debate Among Astronomers

This new idea is not accepted by all scientists. Star clusters and individual stars can appear nearly the same, in JWST's resolution,” said Brian Welch, the leader of the team that first found Earendel. He thinks we need more information before anyone can say for sure.

The Next Step

To settle the matter, scientists are trying to watch Earendel for any microlensing, minuscule changes in brightness that could reveal how big it is. A future study with JWST of Earendel may potentially reveal if it is a single star or a star cluster.

Comments

CSIRO Uses Quantum AI to Revolutionize Semiconductor Design

Researchers at Australia's CSIRO have achieved a world-first demonstration of quantum machine learning in semiconductor fabrication. The quantum-enhanced model outperformed conventional AI methods and could reshape how microchips are designed. The team focused on modeling a crucial—but hard to predict—property called “Ohmic contact” resistance, which measures how easily current flows where metal meets a semiconductor. They analysed 159 experimental samples from advanced gallium nitride (GaN) transistors (known for high power/high-frequency performance). By combining a quantum processing layer with a final classical regression step, the model extracted subtle patterns that traditional approaches had missed. Tackling a difficult design problem According to the study, the CSIRO researchers first encoded many fabrication variables (like gas mixtures and annealing times) per device and used principal component analysis (PCA) to shrink 37 parameters down to the five most important ones. ...

Hubble Uncovers Multi-Age Stars in Ancient Cluster, Reshaping Galaxy Origins

Astronomers call ancient star clusters like NGC 1786 “time capsules” for their galaxy, preserving some of its oldest stars. A new image from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope offers an unprecedented close-up of this dense cluster 160,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud. Hubble's data show that NGC 1786 contains stars of different ages – a surprising find, since such clusters were once thought to hold a single stellar generation. This multi-age discovery is reshaping our view of how galaxies built their first stars, and suggests more complex early history. Mixed-Age Stars in a Galactic Time Capsule According to the official source, this Hubble image shows the globular cluster NGC 1786, a ball of densely packed stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud about 160,000 light-years from Earth. Astronomers captured this picture as part of a program comparing ancient clusters in nearby dwarf galaxies (like the LMC) with clusters in our own Milky Way. The surprising discovery is th...

A Planet with a Death Wish: How HIP 67522 b Is Forcing Its Star to Explode

Scientists have caught a planet with a death wish, which is an alien world, orbiting very near to its star, and so speedy that it is causing the star to go to its death with bursting explosions. HIP 67522 b is the planet, and it is of the same size as Jupiter with a seven-day orbit around its host star. These orbits are disturbing the magnetic field of the star and causing enormous blasting eruptions to blow back the planet and make it wrinkled. This is the first time that a planet is influencing the host star, as the astronomers reported in a study published on July 2, 2025, in the Journal Nature. A Planet with a Death Wish: HIP 67522 b's Fiery Orbit As per the study by NASA, Ekaterina Ilin, the first author of the study and an astrophysicist at the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy, said that the planet was observed to trigger the energetic flares. It has been predicted by the scientists that the waves are setting off explosions that are going to happen. Magnetic Chaos: P...

Kartavya Kant Tiwari

Search This Blog