NASA
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This detailed view highlights the position of the star Earendel along a ripple in space-time (dashed line).
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Nationalgeographic.co.id—The United States Space Agency’s Hubble Space Telescope, NASA has reportedly detected the farthest star ever observed to date. So far away, the star is 12.9 billion light years from Earth. The star is named Earendelwhich means “morning star” in Old English.
This new detection from Hubble is a remarkable new benchmark, according to astronomers. Detected stellar light that existed in the first billion years after the birth of the universe in the big bang, the most distant individual stars seen to date.
The discovery is a major leap forward, replacing previous observations also from Hubble in 2018. The star existed when the universe was about 4 billion years, or 30 percent of its current age, at a time astronomers call the “red shift 1, 5”. Scientists use the word “redshift” because as the universe expands, light from distant objects is stretched or “shifted” to longer, redder wavelengths as it moves toward us.
The newly detected star is so far away that its light takes 12.9 billion years to reach Earth. It looks to us like when the universe was only 7 percent of its current age, at a redshift of 6.2. The smallest objects previously seen at great distances were star clusters, embedded within the galaxy beginning.
Astronomer Brian Welch from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore explained the findings. “We almost couldn’t believe it at first, it was so much further away than the previous most distant star, the highest redshift,” Welch said in a media release by NASA.
The discovery was made from data collected during Hubble’s RELICS (Reionization Lensing Cluster Survey) program. The research report has been published in the journal Nature by title “A highly magnified star at redshift 6.2.“
NASA
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Hubble Telescope Illustration
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Welc says, usually at that distance, entire galaxies look like tiny smudges, with light from millions of stars converging. “The galaxy that hosts this star has been enlarged and distorted by gravitational lenses into a long crescent moon that we named the Sunrise Arc,” he said.
After studying the galaxy in detail, Welch determined that it was a very large star which he called Earendel, which means “morning star” in Old English. The discovery promises to open an uncharted era of very early star formation.
“Earendel has been around for so long that it probably didn’t have all the same raw materials as the stars around us today,” explains Welch.
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