The Hubble Space Telescope identified its most distant star. The star is so far away that it has taken 13 billion years for it to reach us.
The farthest star observed by Hubble was a star from 4 billion years after the Big bang. It was only observable because of a fortuitous alignment, and it was so far away from the previous highest redshift star that we almost didn't believe it at first.
The star Earendel, which means "morning star" in Old English, is at least 50 times the mass of the sun. It is millions of times brighter. It was only possible to observe it because of a huge galaxy cluster that passed between it and us. The cluster's gravity is so large that it warps the light coming from the star and acts as a magnifying class.
At these distances, the light from millions of stars blend together, making the entire galaxies look like small smudges.
This star is so old that it can give clues about the composition of the early universe.
Earendel may not have had the same raw materials as the stars around us today. We started with the second chapter of the book and now we will have a chance to see how it all started.
This research paves the way for further investigations of very distant, very ancient stars which will be possible once the James Webb Space Telescope begins science operations this summer.
We could see stars even more distant than Earendel, which would be incredibly exciting. I would love to see Earendel break his record.
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