Overwhelmed by 'monsters' appearing from a world 12.9 billion years ago

Earendel is a million times brighter than the Sun, a class of "monster" stars of the early universe. If it still exists in real time, it would have fled 28 billion light years from Earth.

The NASA/ESA/CSA (US, European, Canadian space agencies) James Webb Telescope has made a new breakthrough in unveiling the mystery of the most distant star ever found in the universe: Earendel .

Earendel is a monster of a size but has a monotonous composition because it belongs to a primitive generation of stars , existing in a young universe that is poor in chemistry and full of violence.

This panoramic image of the sky seen by Earendel through a gravitational lens shows the object stretched into a red crescent of light - (Image: NASA/ESA/SPACE TELESCOPE SCIENCE INSTITUTE).

The ancient object was first discovered by the older Hubble telescope, but thanks to the cutting-edge James Webb "magic eye", scientists can really study it in depth.

New data confirms that Earendel was born 12.9 billion years ago , 12.9 billion light years from Earth. That means its light took that long to reach James Webb, and the image we see of it is an image of the past .

If it still exists, Earendel would now be 28 billion light years away from Earth, as the universe has expanded so much since then.

In fact, neither Hubble nor James Webb directly observed this ancient object but took advantage of the "gravitational lensing" effect, according to Space.

A gravitational lens is a large spatial structure with enough gravity to "bend" space-time, creating a giant magnifying glass between the telescope and the object it is trying to observe.

For Earendel, the galaxy cluster WHL0137-08 acted as a gravitational lens, distorting the light from the ancient star into a long crescent that researchers nicknamed the 'Sunrise Arc.'

NASA scientists also calculated that this monster star has a mass at least 50 times that of the Sun and is millions of times brighter.

That is the origin of the name Earendel, meaning "morning star" or "rising light". It is this brightness that makes it "transcendant" enough to reach Earth's telescopes.

"This discovery gives us the opportunity to study a star in detail in the early universe," astrophysicist Brian Welch from Johns Hopkins University (USA), lead author of the study on Earendel, told Space.

He also stressed that it was not the most distant object ever observed. Both Hubble and James Webb have found galaxies farther away, but those were stars that were mixed together.

So, it can be said that Earendel is the most distant, oldest star to be observed separately and completely, helping to reveal important details about the evolution of the universe.