Brian Welch

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Brian Welch

Born  | 1995[1]
Wheaton, Illinois[1]
Occupation  | astronomer
Known for  | led the team that announced the most ancient and most distant star

Brian Welch is a PhD student, studying Astronomy, at John Hopkins University.[2][3] His thesis supervisor, Dan Coe, discovered a very distant galaxy, called The Sunrise Arc, in 2016. That Galaxy was only found because the gravity of a supercluster of galaxies that lie between us and The Sunrise Arc magnified its light, through Gravitational lensing.

Coe assigned Welch the task of examining promising objects within The Sunrise Arc.[2][4] Because of the COVID 19 epidemic he did much of his work at home, on his laptop.[1]

In June, 2021, Welch published an article in the Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, announcing the observation of several small, dense globular clusters, within the galaxy.[5]

Meanwhile Welch had found, in 2018, an object now known as Earendel.[2] Welch co-ordinated an international team of Astronomers, who confirmed that Earendel seemed to be a very distant early star. Welch was the lead author of a paper in the prestigious Science journal Nature, announcing the discovery, on March 30, 2022.[6]

Welch played football, in high school, and The Daily Herald reports that, at 6 foot 6 inches, he might be the world's tallest astrophyscist.[1]

## References[edit]

1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 Burt Constable. Constable: A star is born, as Wheaton native makes astrophysics history, Daily Herald, 2022-04-05. Retrieved on 2022-07-21. “Instead, the 27-year-old astrophysicist discovered the oldest and most distant star known to man. And he got to name it.” mirror
2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Joel Achenbach. Hubble telescope detects most distant star ever seen, near cosmic dawn, Washington Post, 2022-03-30. Retrieved on 2022-03-30. “Earendel is part of an early, small galaxy whose light has been magnified and distorted in two curved strips as a result of such lensing. Astronomer Dan Coe of Johns Hopkins discovered and named the Sunrise Arc in 2016 as part of a Hubble observation program. Welch, Coe’s student, scrutinized a tiny speck — some kind of object — providentially located on the arc where the magnification was highest. Over the course of 3½ years, the object remained in that spot.”
3. ↑ Hannah Devlin. Distant star found by Hubble telescope may be earliest we will ever see, The Guardian, 2022-03-30. Retrieved on 2022-03-30. “The observations have been hailed as hugely significant and been prioritised for the first cycle of observations using Nasa’s James Webb Space Telescope, due to begin in June.”
4. ↑ Emma Chapman. A star is reborn: how Hubble astronomers saw the earliest light, The Guardian, 2022-04-10. Retrieved on 2022-07-21. “In one snapshot, Welch and his team saw a faraway galaxy that had been magnified and distorted. Nothing new there. But within that distorted galaxy, there was an unexpected bright smudge. One star in the galaxy aligned with the lens so precisely that its image has been enhanced a thousand times over, making it seem big and bright. And the colour of the light from Earendel indicates we are seeing ancient light.”
5. ↑ B. Welch. Relics: Parsec-Scale Star Clusters In The First Billion Years, Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society. Retrieved on 2022-03-30. “I will present RELICS observations of the highly magnified Sunrise Arc, a 15" long lensed arc observed at z = 6.2.” mirror
6. ↑ Brian Welch, et al. (2022-03-30). "A highly magnified star at redshift 6.2". Nature 603: 815-818. DOI:10.1038/s41586-022-04449-y. Retrieved on 2022-03-30. Research Blogging.