NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has established an extraordinary new benchmark: detecting
the light of a star that existed within the first billion years after the universe’s
birth in the big bang—the farthest individual star ever seen to date.
The newly detected star is 12.9 billion light years away, meaning that the light took 12.9
billion years to reach Earth.
The previous record was 9 billion light years away.
Normally at these distances, entire galaxies look like small, dim smudges with the light
from millions of stars blending together, but the galaxy hosting this star was magnified
and distorted by gravitational lensing into a long crescent that astronomers named the
Sunrise Arc.
Gravitational lensing occurs when a tremendous mass warps the fabric of space, creating a
powerful natural magnifying glass that distorts and greatly amplifies the light from distant
objects behind it.
The combined mass of a foreground group of galaxies created the lens that allowed astronomers
to see this distant star.
After studying the galaxy in detail, they determined that one feature is an extremely
magnified star that they called Earendel, which means “morning star” in Old English.
The research team estimates that Earendel is at least 50 times the mass of our Sun and
millions of times as bright, rivaling the most massive stars known.
Earendel existed so long ago that it may not have had all the same raw materials as the
stars around us today.
Studying Earendel will be a window into an era of the universe that we are unfamiliar
with, but that led to everything we know today.