. Based on its mass and its superlatively ancient light, the researchers who found Earendel say the star is no more.“It has gone supernova by now,” Brian Welch, an astrophysicist at The Johns Hopkins University and lead author of, told Gizmodo at the time, “and exploded and spread its guts across the rest of the universe to create those heavier elements that will eventually go into making things like you and me.
The star sits in the Sunrise Arc, a strongly magnified galaxy from the first billion years of the universe’s existence. The arc is a quirky sight produced by gravitational lensing, the phenomenon that allows astronomers to peer much deeper into space than they could otherwise.Gravitational lensing occurs when an intervening object bends and magnifies light from a distant source as it travels toward the observer.because its light is intensely bent by a massive galaxy cluster named WHL0137-08.