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.
01:51Amen.
01:58Amen.
02:00Amen.
02:02Amen.
02:08Amen.
02:10Amen.
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