How Did Hubble Spot The Most Distant Star Yet?

Space.com

The Hubble Space Telescope has captured imagery of the most distant single star found yet. It took the light from the star 12.9 billion light years to reach Earth. Learn how it was discovered.  Credit; NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

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00:00NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has established an extraordinary new benchmark, detecting

00:06the light of a star that existed within the first billion years after the Universe's

00:10birth in the Big Bang, the farthest individual star ever seen to date.

00:17The newly detected star is 12.9 billion light-years away, meaning that the light took 12.9 billion

00:24years to reach Earth. The previous record was 9 billion light-years away.

00:30Normally at these distances, entire galaxies look like small, dim smudges with the light

00:36from millions of stars blending together. But the galaxy hosting this star was magnified

00:42and distorted by gravitational lensing into a long crescent that astronomers named the

00:47Sunrise Arc. Gravitational lensing occurs when a tremendous mass warps the fabric of space

00:54of space, creating a powerful natural magnifying glass that distorts and greatly amplifies the

01:00light from distant objects behind it. The combined mass of a foreground group of galaxies created

01:06a lens that allowed astronomers to see this distant star. After studying the galaxy in detail,

01:13they determined that one feature is an extremely magnified star that they called Arendelle, which

01:19means Morning Star in Old English. The research team estimates that Arendelle is at least 50 times

01:26the mass of our Sun and millions of times as bright, rivaling the most massive stars known.

01:32Arendelle existed so long ago that it may not have had all the same raw materials as the stars

01:38around us today. Studying Arendelle will be a window into an era of the Universe that we are unfamiliar with,

01:44but that led to everything we know today.

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