The farthest star ever seen was spotted by the Hubble Space Telescope. A stretched out red line with three dots is what the magnified galaxy looks like. The middle one is the single star.
NASA, ESA, Brian Welch (JHU), Dan Coe (STScI)The most distant single star ever seen has been captured by the Hubble Space Telescope.
The stars are seen as they appeared when the light traveled through space just 900 million years after the Big bang.
Most of the light that scientists have seen from the early days of the universe has come from the same places as little blobs.
The lead author of the scientific report that describes this work is a PhD candidate.
The previous record-holder was the most distant star ever observed. The light traveled through space for 9 billion years after it was spotted by Hubble.
The star Earendel is an Old English word that means "morning star" or "rising light" and is at least 50 times the mass of the Sun.
He says that the James Webb Space Telescope, which was launched into space late last year, should soon be able to learn what this early star is made of and how hot it is.
The most powerful ever built telescope will help researchers understand how stars like this one were evolving at this early moment in the universe.
It was a lucky break that the discovery was found.
The star was in a spot that was affected by a kind of natural magnifying glass.
Albert Einstein predicted that a massive object like a cluster of galaxies would warp the space around itself, and that it would act as a lens that magnifies light.
Scientists use this phenomenon to look for objects that are too faint to see.
When they found a magnified galaxy from the first billion years of the universe, they had been doing that. He was trying to understand how the light had been distorted. He realized that there should be a high level of magnification.
The level of magnification was so high that it became apparent that the researchers were looking at something small. It had to be a single star or a pair of stars, not a star cluster or a large part of a galaxy.
"It's pretty amazing to find this, and I'm an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz."
He says that the volume of space that gets magnified by giant clusters of galaxies is not all that large. That is sort of an astonishing discovery.
Illingworth thinks it is likely that this star is part of the same universe they were studying.
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