JWST Imaging of Earendel, the Extremely Magnified Star at Redshift z= 6.2

B Welch, D Coe, E Zackrisson…�- The Astrophysical�…, 2022 - iopscience.iop.org
B Welch, D Coe, E Zackrisson, SE de Mink, S Ravindranath, J Anderson, G Brammer…
The Astrophysical Journal Letters, 2022iopscience.iop.org
The gravitationally lensed star WHL 0137–LS, nicknamed Earendel, was identified with a
photometric redshift z phot= 6.2�0.1 based on images taken with the Hubble Space
Telescope. Here we present James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) Near Infrared Camera
images of Earendel in eight filters spanning 0.8–5.0 μm. In these higher-resolution images,
Earendel remains a single unresolved point source on the lensing critical curve, increasing
the lower limit on the lensing magnification to μ> 4000 and restricting the source plane�…
Abstract
The gravitationally lensed star WHL 0137–LS, nicknamed Earendel, was identified with a photometric redshift z phot= 6.2�0.1 based on images taken with the Hubble Space Telescope. Here we present James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) Near Infrared Camera images of Earendel in eight filters spanning 0.8–5.0 μm. In these higher-resolution images, Earendel remains a single unresolved point source on the lensing critical curve, increasing the lower limit on the lensing magnification to μ> 4000 and restricting the source plane radius further to r< 0.02 pc, or∼ 4000 au. These new observations strengthen the conclusion that Earendel is best explained by an individual star or multiple star system and support the previous photometric redshift estimate. Fitting grids of stellar spectra to our photometry yields a stellar temperature of T eff≃ 13,000–16,000 K, assuming the light is dominated by a single star. The delensed bolometric luminosity in this case ranges from
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