What is Earendel?

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About Earendel:

It is a star discovered by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2022 and it is the most distant and earliest known star.
It is a massive B-type star that is more than twice as hot as our Sun and about a million times more luminous.
It is located in the Sunrise Arc Galaxy and is around 12.9 billion years away.
Both Webb and Hubble were only able to detect it due to a natural phenomenon called gravitational lensing.
The star happened to be aligned behind a wrinkle in space-time created by the galaxy cluster WHL0137-08, which is located between us and Earendel.

What is gravitational lensing?

It occurs when a massive celestial body, such as a galaxy cluster, causes a sufficient curvature of spacetime for the path of light around it to be visibly bent, as if by a lens.
The body causing the light to curve is accordingly called a gravitational lens.
An important consequence of this lensing distortion is magnification, allowing us to observe objects that would otherwise be too far away and too faint to be seen.

Q1) What is B-type star?

A B-type star is a classification for a type of star based on its spectral characteristics. Spectral classification is a system astronomers use to categorize stars based on the features present in their spectra, which provide information about the star’s temperature, composition, and other properties.

Source: Webb captures Earendel, most distant star ever discovered