It took Hubble 12.9 billion years to look back.
The most distant individual star we have ever seen was captured by the legendary space telescope. The previous record was shattered by around 4 billion years. The record-breaking observation was announced by the European Space Agency.
The star is red-shifted, meaning it has stretched as it travels away from us. The longest wavelength of visible light is red and it appears to us Earthlings.
It was so far away from the previous highest redshift star that we almost didn't believe it at first. The research about the detection was published in the journal Nature.
The star, dubbed Earendel for "morning star" in Old English, is shown in a Hubble image.
The extremely distant star "Earendel" is designated by an arrow. Credit: NASA / ESA / B. Welch (JHU) / D. Coe (STScI) / A. Pagan (STScI)
Our space telescopes are unable to detect a single star in the deep, deep, deep cosmos. Earendel is 50 times more massive than the sun and millions of times brighter.
At these distances, the light from millions of stars blend together, making the entire galaxies look like small smudges.
Earendel was made visible by a trick of the universe.
Massive objects in the universe are like a bowling ball sitting on a mattress. There is a cluster of galaxies between Earth and Earendel. The fabric of space has been warped by the galaxies, creating a powerful natural magnifying glass that distorts and greatly enhances the light from distant objects behind it.
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Earendel happens to be located on or near aripple created in space, which ultimately made such potent magnification.
More than 30 years after it started peering at the universe, the Hubble Telescope continues to make unprecedented observations. The new observatory, the James Webb Space Telescope, has joined Hubble in space. The telescope will soon begin its observations, looking at the earliest galaxies ever formed as well as mysterious planets in our own Milky Way.
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