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[ INSIDE THE IMAGE // HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE ]

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[Earendel]

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What we're looking at here is an image
from the Hubble Space

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Telescope of the Sunrise Arc,
which is this long

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red banana that you can see on the screen,
right there.

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And then what's highlighted by that white
arrow is the lensed star

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Earendel, which is the most distant star
that's been observed so far.

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So we're seeing this entire galaxy
as it was about 13 billion years ago.

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This particular discovery
was thanks to gravitational lensing.

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So what you can kind of see

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in the background here
with all these sort of yellowish galaxies,

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those are all galaxies
that are part of a galaxy cluster.

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And this galaxy cluster is

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a very massive object that actually bends
the spacetime around it.

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And as the light from this distant galaxy
passes through that distorted spacetime,

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it gets magnified.

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And stretched out into this long
arc that we see.

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Because of exactly
where all these galaxies are

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there is a peak right here,
right on this point,

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where the magnification
starts to skyrocket,

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so it starts to become an incredibly high
magnification just right in that spot.

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And that's how we able to to see this one star. 

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The original image looks like this.

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So this is where you can see,
you know, all of these sort of fuzzy

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yellow galaxies
around here form a pretty clear cluster.

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You can still

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kind of see this faint
red arc down here at the bottom.

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And that was what piqued
our interest originally.

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Anything that's that red
is going to be at a very high redshift,

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which means it's
very early in the universe.

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So that was kind of why
we first got interested.

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You can also see just kind of
how long this object is.

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So this is the longest lensed arc
that we've seen at a redshift six or above.

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So that's within the first billion years
of the universe.

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And it kind of opens the door to looking
at the very first generation of stars.

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So, the very first stars would form,
you know, a few hundred

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million years, maybe
1 to 300 million years after the Big Bang.

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It's kind of that ballpark.

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So this kind of gives us a foot
in that door.

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That gives us a really good chance
to continue to discover

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more of these objects and,

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you know, hopefully push that boundary
a little bit further

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and really get a chance to
to find one of the very first generation stars.

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Image of Earendel -WHL0137-LS. Hundreds of galaxies in the image with a box callout of the sunrise arc with a white arrow pointing to Earendel.

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