The farthest star yet was formed 13 billion years ago at the dawn of the universe.
The blue star was so large that it almost certainly exploded into bits just a few million years after it emerged. It's amazing that an international team spotted it with the help of the Hubble Space Telescope. It takes a long time for light from distant stars to reach us.
The star was about 12.8 billion years old, which is 900 million years after the Big bang, according to astronomer Brian Welch, the lead author of the study.
We definitely got lucky.
Earendel is an Old English name which means morning star or rising light and is a fitting name for a star that we have observed in a time when it was called Cosmic Dawn.
The previous record-holder was a blue supergiant star named Icarus, which formed 9.4 billion years ago. It's more than 4 billion years after the Big bang.
Astronomers used a technique called gravitational lensing to amplify the minuscule starlight. In the foreground, the gravity from clusters of galaxies serves as a lens to see smaller objects in the background. If not for that, Earendel would not have been visible.
The Hubble Telescope has been able to see the universe as far away as 300 million to 400 million years ago, but it's not possible to pick out individual stars.
Usually they are all smooshed together. Nature has given us this one star, which is magnified by factors of thousands, so that we can study it.
The findings were described by Vinicius Placco of the National Science Foundation's NOIRlab in Tucson, Arizona.
Earendel may have been among the first generation of stars born after the Big bang, based on the data from the Hubble telescope. He said that future observations by the James Webb Space Telescope should provide more details and give us another piece of the puzzle that is the evolution of our universe.
Earendel was more than 50 times the size of our sun and 1 million times brighter, according to current data. Earendel's small, yet-to-mature home galaxy looked nothing like the pretty spiral galaxies photographed elsewhere by Hubble.
It is like a little snapshot in amber of the past.
Earendel may have been a prominent star in a two-star system or a triple- or quadruple-star system. There is a chance that it could be a black hole, although the observations gathered in 2016 and 2019 suggest otherwise.
The star lasted barely a few million years before exploding as a supernova, which is what most do. Astronomers have seen distant supernovas, but the most distant one goes back 12 billion years.
The telescope is 100 times more powerful than Hubble and should help clarify how hot the star really is.
We are made up of some of that stardust, so we are literally understanding where we came from.
More information: Brian Welch, A highly magnified star at redshift 6.2, Nature (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-04449-y. www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04449-y Journal information: NatureThe Associated Press. All rights belong to the person. The material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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