Using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, scientists have discovered the most distant individual star on record, a bright behemoth they nicknamed Earendel - Old English for 'morning star' - because it existed during the dawn of the universe.
This detailed view highlights the star Earendel's position along a ripple in space-time that magnifies it and makes it possible for the star to be detected over such a great distance - nearly 13 billion light-years. Also indicated is a cluster of stars that is mirrored on either side of the line of magnification. The distortion and magnification are created by the mass of a huge galaxy cluster located in between Hubble and Earendel.
Explaining its nickname, Welch said the researchers figured that the "morning star" existing during the Cosmic Dawn period was "a good parallel." "So normally when we look at very distant objects, what we're seeing is the light from an entire galaxy - so millions of stars all blended together - and we've been able to see those out to even farther distances. But in this case, thanks to a very massive cluster of galaxies in the foreground, the light from this one star has just been very, very highly magnified, so we're able to see this single star at a much greater distance," Welch said.
Until now, the most distant single star on record was one nicknamed Icarus that existed 4 billion years after Earendel.
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