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
00:23years 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.
00:49Gravitational lensing occurs when a tremendous mass warps the fabric of space, creating a
00:55powerful natural magnifying glass that distorts and greatly amplifies the light from distant
01:01objects behind it.
01:03The combined mass of a foreground group of galaxies created a lens that allowed astronomers to
01:08see this distant star.
01:11After studying the galaxy in detail, they determined that one feature is an extremely magnified
01:16star that they called Arendelle, which means Morning Star in Old English.
01:22The research team estimates that Arendelle is at least 50 times the mass of our Sun and millions
01:28of times as bright, rivaling the most massive stars known. Arendelle existed so long ago that
01:36it may not have had all the same raw materials as the stars around us today. Studying Arendelle will
01:42be a window into an era of the universe that we are unfamiliar with, but that led to everything
01:48we know today.
Comments