The Hubble Space Telescope detected light from a star that existed in the first billion years after the birth of the universe in the Big Bang. As reported by the European Space Agency (ESA), which operates the device in conjunction with its American counterpart (NASA), Earendel is the “farthest star ever seen.”
“The finding is a huge leap further back in time than the previous record for a single star, detected by Hubble in 2018. That star existed when the universe was about 4 billion years old, or 30 percent of its current age. », NASA explained. Additionally, the news
That moment, he noted, is called by astronomers a “redshift of 1.5.” “Scientists use the term ‘redshift’ because as the universe expands, light from distant objects is stretched or ‘shifted’ to longer, redder wavelengths as it travels towards us,” he added.
Lead author of the Nature paper on the discovery, astronomer Brian Welch commented that “at first we hardly believed it: it was much further away than the previous most distant redshift star.”
“Normally, at these distances, entire galaxies are seen as small spots, where light from millions of stars mixes. The galaxy that hosts this star has been enlarged and distorted by gravitational lensing into a long crescent we call the Arc of Dawn,” said the expert from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
Earendel, the name Welch himself chose for the find, means “morning star” in Old English. “The discovery promises to open an uncharted era of very early star formation,” NASA said.
The agency explained in a statement that the light from this star took 12.9 billion years to reach Earth. In other words, it appeared when the universe was only 7% of its current age, at a redshift of 6.2. The paper added that “the smallest objects previously seen at such a great distance were star clusters within early galaxies.”
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