Hubble recently took a 12.9 billion-year trip back in time.
The light from the farthest distant individual star ever observed by humanity was caught by the famous space telescope. Hubble’s discovery beats the previous record by almost 4 billion years. The record-breaking observation was reported on March 30 by the European Space Agency (ESA), which runs the telescope with NASA.
The star is extremely “red-shifted,” which means that as it travels away from us in the ever-expanding universe, this ancient light has been stretched. Such twisted and stretched light appears to us on Earth in red, which has the longest wavelength of visible light.
In a statement, Brian Welch, an astronomer at Johns Hopkins University, said, “We nearly didn’t believe it at first since it was so much farther away than the previous most distant, highest redshift star.” Welch was the lead researcher on the detection study, which was also published in Nature.
The arrow in the zoomed-in Hubble image below points to the now-famous star, called “Earendel” for “dawn star” in Old English, NASA said in a report.
How did Hubble see such a faraway star?
Our space telescopes are currently unable to discover even a single star in the deep, deep, deep cosmos. (Even stars such as Earendel, which are 50 times more massive and millions of times luminous than the sun.)
“Normally, entire galaxies appear as little smudges at these distances, the light from millions of stars mixing together,” Welch explained.
Earendel was enlarged by a cosmic trick, making it visible.
https://twitter.com/NASAHubble/status/1509185692903034890
Massive objects in the cosmos, like a bowling ball on top of a mattress, distort space. Between Earth and the exceedingly distant star Earendel, a cluster of galaxies (WHL0137-08) exists. The galaxies have stretched space’s fabric, resulting in a “strong natural magnifying glass that distorts and substantially amplifies the light from distant objects behind it,” according to the ESA.
Earendel is situated on or near a “ripple” generated in space that resulted in such extreme magnification. The ESA noted, “The effect is akin to the rippling surface of a swimming pool creating patterns of dazzling light on the pool’s bottom on a sunny day.” “The ripples on the surface work as lenses, focusing sunlight on the pool floor to maximum brightness.”
More than 30 years after it began peeking into the cosmos, the Hubble Telescope, which orbits 340 miles above Earth, continues to produce remarkable observations. Hubble is now joined in space by a revolutionary new observatory, the powerful James Webb Space Telescope. Webb will soon begin its observations, looking for the first galaxies to develop as well as intriguing worlds in our own Milky Way.