Earendel, The Farthest Star 12.9 Billion Light Years Away

KOMPAS.com – Astronomers recently used NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to find the farthest single star on record.

The bright giant is called Earendel. Reported Reuters, March 31, 2022, researchers say the star is very hot and blue in color.

Earendel Star estimated to be 50 to 100 times the mass of the Sun in this galaxy. Earendel’s light reaches Earth or is visible to humans on Earth after traveling for 12.9 billion years.

That means the star existed when the universe was only 7 percent of its current age.

Earendel was born about 900 million years after the Big Bang event in the early universe. It belongs to the earliest generation of stars.

The first Earendel Hubble portrait was obtained in 2016, with follow-up observations in 2019.

Researchers hope to study it further using the next-generation James Webb Space Telescope.

Apart from Earendel, the farthest single star on record is Icarus, which is 4 billion light-years away.

Also read: Get to know Binoculars: Definition, Types, and How Telescopes Work

Why is it called Earendel?

Reported Space, Friday (1/4/2022), related research Earendel star led by an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Brian Welch.

On March 30, 2022 he announced that with observations from Hubble, they had found the most distant single star ever seen. The star was actually codenamed WHL0137-LS, but later they gave it the unique name of Earendel.

–
–