The Hubble Space Telescope has just discovered the most distant star ever observed. The star is 28 billion light years from Earth!
This star has the official name WHL0137-LS, but the astronomer who discovered it gave it the nickname 'Earendel' from Old English which means 'morning star' or 'rising light'. The size of this star is believed to be 50 to 500 times larger than the sun and millions of times brighter.
It is the most distant star ever detected, only 900 million years after the Big Bang. So far away, light from Earendel takes 12.9 billion light years to reach Earth.
This observation beats the previous record set by Hubble, namely the star Icarus which emitted its light 9.4 billion years ago or 3.4 billion years younger than Earendel.
"When the light we see from Earendel was emitted, the universe was less than a billion years old; only 6% of its current age," said researchers from the Cosmic Dawn Center Victoria Strait in a statement. /2022).
"At that time it was 4 billion light years from the proto Milky Way, but during the nearly 13 billion light years it took to reach us, the universe has expanded so that it is now 28 billion light years away," he continued.
With such a distance, space telescopes that exist today can barely detect stars in deep space. The outer galaxies look like the blurry light of the billions of stars within them.
But the universe has its own way of making this star observable, namely by gravitational lensing. Gravitational lensing occurs when objects that are closer to the telescope act like a magnifying glass to see objects that are farther away.
RECORD BROKEN: Hubble observed the farthest individual star ever seen!
This extraordinary new benchmark detected light from a star that existed within the first billion years after the universe's birth in the big bang.
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— Hubble (@NASAHubble) March 30, 2022
In this case, the arrangement of galaxy clusters acts as a magnifying glass and amplifies Earendel's light by thousands of times. Thanks to gravitational lensing and nine hours of Hubble observations, this photo of Earendel was captured.
"Typically at this distance, entire galaxies look like tiny specks, with light from millions of stars converging," said Johns Hopkins University astronomer Brian Welch. Welch led a study of the findings, published in the journal Nature.
"The galaxy that hosts this star has been enlarged and distorted by gravitational lensing into a long crescent moon that we named the Sunrise Arc," he added.
To make sure that Earendel is really one star, not two adjacent stars, the research team will use the recently launched James Webb telescope. Webb can also reveal the temperature and mass of stars.
Astronomers also want to know the composition of Earendel because this star formed shortly after the universe began. The Webb telescope will also help astronomers search for more distant stars, beating Hubble's findings.
"With Webb, we might see stars further away from Earendel, which would be very interesting. We'll be looking into the past as far back as possible. I can't wait to see Webb break the Earendel distance," Welch said.