Astronomers believe that the discovered star, unofficially named Mothra – a double system consisting of red and blue supergiants. The temperature of the first reaches 5 thousand degrees, and the luminosity is 50 thousand times greater than the solar. The blue giant has a temperature of 14 thousand degrees and is 125 thousand times brighter than the Sun.
“Interestingly, when we looked at archival images of the MACS0416 cluster, obtained by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2014, we found Mothra on them. True, then the “monster star” remained unnoticed”, – noted the participants of the observations.
Interestingly, the star’s light amplification of 4 thousand times seems too great even for such a massive galaxy cluster as MACS0416. Astronomers believe that somewhere between it and Mothra there must be another object that creates an additional gravitational lens, and its mass lies in the range between a globular cluster and a dwarf galaxy. However, James Webb sees nothing of the sort in this region, a problem that is explained by the fact that the star system is mostly made up of dark matter.
