We are
so excited because the Hubble Space Telescope has actually observed
the farthest star, individual star that we've ever seen.
It's shining to us from nearly 13 billion light years away.
That means its light began its trek to us nearly 13 billion years ago,
and we're able to discern its light even now.
Hubble was able to pick out this one
individual star within its galaxy In an unusual way,
it's a technique or a trick in a sense that we call gravitational lensing.
Nature itself provides us this magnification
When we have something very massive, in this case a cluster of galaxies
that distorts space itself through the gravity caused by the mass
inside the cluster, that distorted space actually acts like a lens.
So anything behind it, that shining light that comes through it on
its way to us gets distorted.
The light gets stretched out into interesting arcs and things get magnified.
We use Hubble to see magnified distant galaxies quite often.
This gravitational lensing effect helps us to study
very distant galaxies that get magnified.
But we usually cannot identify individual stars in those distant galaxies.
Usually the light from the hundreds of billions of stars gets blended together
In this case, the alignment of that foreground cluster
or the lens, as we call it with the background galaxy was just right.
So that one star in the outskirts of that background galaxy
was just in the line of sight to get magnified
hundreds of times over its normal brightness,
and we were able to pick it out and discern it as an individual star
By observing and discerning
one individual star in an extremely distant galaxy,
we can start to learn
what stars were like when they first began to form in the universe.
So keep in mind that this star is in a galaxy
that's nearly 13 billion light years away.
That means it took nearly 13 billion years for this light to get to us.
Our whole universe is only 13.8 billion years old.
So this galaxy had formed early in the universe.
Its stars are primitive.
There hadn't been very many generations of stars
yet coming and going in that galaxy to create the heavier
elements that enrich stars like our sun today.
So we expect by studying this individual star in this very distant
early galaxy, that we'll learn what the early universe was like
and what some of the earliest generations of stars were made of
The Hubble Space Telescope is doing very well.
It's powerful.
It's as scientifically productive as ever, and we're looking forward
to the kinds of science that Hubble will be doing in the coming years.
We're particularly excited about the James Webb Space Telescope,
also operating in space, along with the Hubble Space Telescope.
By having both of these amazing facilities.
We're going to learn more about the universe than we've ever been
able to before.
The Webb telescope can follow up on observations such as this one of this
distant star with Hubble by doing follow up spectroscopy,
sensitive infrared observations, giving us more information.
And then in general, the Hubble telescope
sees kinds of light that the Webb cannot see and vice versa.
So we'll have the Webb telescope
teaching us things that the universe reveals to us in infrared light.
And the Hubble telescope observing invisible light and ultraviolet light.
And together, the information from these two observatories
is going to give us a brand new view in a richer understanding
of everything from these distant galaxies to even stars
and their planets in our own galaxy and even our own solar system.
This star
shining to us from very early in the universe
seems to be somewhat different than our sun.
It's bigger, maybe 50 or 100 times as massive as our sun.
And we expect that this star's
composition is going to be different than our sun's,
because this star was shining very close to the beginning of the universe,
long before we had generations of stars coming and going
and creating heavier elements that enrich our own sun.
This star is probably almost entirely hydrogen,
a little helium, a smattering of other materials.
We'll know more when we do further observations of the star
with the James Webb Space Telescope.
This is the farthest individual star we've ever seen.
It's not the oldest star.
In fact, what we're seeing in this galaxy is a very young star
that was at its time just getting started.
Now, this was nearly 13 billion years ago,
because it's taken that long for the light to get to us.
So we're not seeing that galaxy as it is today.
We're seeing it as it was toward the beginning of the universe.
And this star in its galaxy was a very young star at that time.
I find it intriguing that we can see one
individual star among hundreds of billions in a distant galaxy.
We're used to seeing now because
of the wonders of the Hubble Space Telescope, distant galaxies.
And I love the rich variety of galaxies that the Hubble Space Telescope picks up.
But these most distant galaxies have light that's pretty much blended together.
They're so far away, we can't usually discern the individual stars.
What's exciting to me about this is that we can actually see
the stretched out, distorted image of the galaxy stretched out
by the lensing effect of the foreground gravitational lensing cluster.
But we can also pick out this individual star,
learn about where it's perched within this galaxy.
And hopefully, as we study it more, learn about how it was formed,
what it's made of, and start understanding how the earliest stars in the universe
contributed to their galaxies and to subsequent generations of stars
like our own sun.
The Hubble Space Telescope is doing very well.
We're excited about that.
It's technically sound.
We've got a terrific crew of experts on the ground that monitor Hubble's
health every day.
And we are continuing a vibrant scientific program
of observing everything from these distant galaxies and stars
to stars and their planets in our own galaxy.
We have plans for doing Hubble science throughout this decade.
And we're particularly excited as to how Hubble will complement
the new James Webb Space Telescope.
They have different capabilities that will complement each other as we're
studying everything from our solar system to the distant universe.
I'm very excited
about this combination of Webb and Hubble for looking at things
like how galaxies have changed over the billion year history of the universe.
The Hubble telescope can show us how vigorous star formation
is going on in regions and galaxies close to us, and even at intermediate
distances between us and the very early universe.
The Webb can peer farther back into space and time
and show us what the first proto galaxies, infant galaxies were like as
they were beginning to form with Hubble and Webb together, we can see
this whole kind of generational picture of early galaxies and later galaxies.
And they tell us something about how the universe has changed over time
and how galaxies have even become more habitable
to planets and even life on at least one planet.