00:00 NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has established an extraordinary new benchmark,
00:05 detecting the light of a star that existed within the first billion years after the universe's birth in the Big Bang,
00:12 the farthest individual star ever seen to date.
00:16 The newly detected star is 12.9 billion light-years away,
00:21 meaning that the light took 12.9 billion years to reach Earth.
00:25 The previous record was 9 billion light-years away.
00:30 Normally at these distances, entire galaxies look like small, dim smudges
00:35 with the light from millions of stars blending together.
00:39 But the galaxy hosting this star was magnified and distorted by gravitational lensing
00:44 into a long crescent that astronomers named the Sunrise Arc.
00:49 Gravitational lensing occurs when a tremendous mass warps the fabric of space,
00:54 creating a powerful natural magnifying glass that distorts and greatly amplifies the light from distant objects behind it.
01:02 The combined mass of a foreground group of galaxies created a lens that allowed astronomers to see this distant star.
01:10 After studying the galaxy in detail,
01:13 they determined that one feature is an extremely magnified star that they called a "Rendell,"
01:19 which means "morning star" in Old English.
01:22 The research team estimates that a Rendell is at least 50 times the mass of our Sun
01:28 and millions of times as bright, rivaling the most massive stars known.
01:33 A Rendell existed so long ago that it may not have had all the same raw materials as the stars around us today.
01:40 Studying a Rendell will be a window into an era of the Universe that we are unfamiliar with,
01:46 but that led to everything we know today.
01:49 [Music]
01:53 [BLANK_AUDIO]
Comments