“Normally at these distances, entire galaxies look like small smudges, with the light from millions of stars blending together,” said lead author Brian Welch, astronomer at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, in a statement. NASA/ESA/Brian Welch (JHU)/Dan Coe (STScI)/Peter Laursen (DAWN) This image shows the tiny region where Earendel aligns so the magnification increases by tens of thousands of times. But distant galaxies look like a blur of the light blended from the billions of stars they contain. Incredibly powerful telescopes can only see individual stars within the closest galaxies. The stars we see in the night sky all exist in our own Milky Way galaxy. At that time it was 4 billion lightyears away from the proto-Milky Way, but during the almost 13 billion years it took the light to reach us, the Universe has expanded so that it is now a staggering 28 billion lightyears away.” “When the light that we see from Earendel was emitted, the Universe was less than a billion years old only 6% of its current age.
“As we peer into the cosmos, we also look back in time, so these extreme high-resolution observations allow us to understand the building blocks of some of the very first galaxies,” said study coauthor Victoria Strait, a postdoctoral research at the Cosmic Dawn Center in Copenhagen, in a statement.
This observation of Earendel could help astronomers to investigate the early years of the universe. Earendel is so distant that the starlight has taken 12.9 billion years to reach us. This observation breaks the record set by Hubble in 2018 when it observed a star that existed when the universe was around four billion years old.
Astronomers have nicknamed the star Earendel, derived from an Old English words that means “morning star” or “rising light.”Ī study detailing the findings published Wednesday in the journal Nature. It’s the farthest detection of a star yet, from 900 million years after the big bang. And the star could be between 50 to 500 times more massive than our sun, and millions of times brighter. The Hubble Space Telescope has glimpsed the most distant single star it’s ever observed, glimmering 28 billion light-years away.
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