[Bumped!] The Earliest Observed Star -- Named For The Old English Word For "Morning Star"... Was The Mystery -- Teased By NASA Last Week.

This is. . . simply. . . excellent. Mystery -- revealed. [This is as though (in your mind's eye, for perspective) -- if you're 42 years old this year -- you are getting a real time playback from your third birthday party, and seeing onward for a few years, from that point. That's how old this "footage" would be, if it were. . . of you.]

A star magnified a thousand fold, by a ripple in space-time, the same way wave-crests cast very bright lines on the bottom of a pool, on a sunny day. That's what's been seen. I'll let NASA tell the rest of this story, now:

. . .The newly detected star [evocatively-named "Earandel", by Brian Welch of the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, for obvious reasons] is so far away that its light has taken 12.9 billion years to reach Earth, appearing to us as it did when the universe was only 7 percent of its current age, at redshift 6.2. The smallest objects previously seen at such a great distance are clusters of stars, embedded inside early galaxies. . . .

Thanks to the rare alignment with the magnifying galaxy cluster, the star Earendel appears directly on, or extremely close to, a ripple in the fabric of space. This ripple, which is defined in optics as a “caustic,” provides maximum magnification and brightening. The effect is analogous to the rippled surface of a swimming pool creating patterns of bright light on the bottom of the pool on a sunny day. The ripples on the surface act as lenses and focus sunlight to maximum brightness on the pool floor.

This caustic causes the star Earendel to pop out from the general glow of its home galaxy. Its brightness is magnified a thousandfold or more. . . .

Astronomers expect that Earendel will remain highly magnified for years to come. It will be observed by NASA’s [Next-Gen] Space Telescope. [That 'scope’s] high sensitivity to infrared light is needed to learn more about Earendel, because its light is stretched (redshifted) to longer infrared wavelengths due to the universe’s expansion.

“We expect to confirm Earendel is indeed a star [with the new 'scope], as well as measure its brightness and temperature,” Coe said. These details will narrow down its type and stage in the stellar lifecycle. "We also expect to find the Sunrise Arc galaxy is lacking in heavy elements that form in subsequent generations of stars. This would suggest Earendel is a rare, massive metal-poor star,” Coe said.

Earendel’s composition will be of great interest for astronomers, because it formed before the universe was filled with the heavy elements produced by successive generations of massive stars. If follow-up studies find that Earendel is only made up of primordial hydrogen and helium, it would be the first evidence for the legendary Population III stars, which are hypothesized to be the very first stars born after the big bang. While the probability is small, Welch admits it is enticing all the same. . . .

Now we know -- and we will know much more, once NASA beams back the data from the [name redacted] gold-coated hexagonal mirrors, now floating at L2. . . awaiting a full-on green light, ot begin imaging. This will be one of its first candidates -- after the dusty, rock-strewn disk we mentioned six summers ago, in all probability. . . and so, onward, smiling. . . .

नमस्ते