Hubble Space Telescope spots farthest star ever seen

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has made history again as it detected the light of a star that existed in the first billionth of life of the Universe after the Big Bang, so it is the farthest star we have ever seen.

The finding is a huge step forward compared to the previous record set in 2018 again by Hubble. NASA then observed the light of the star Icarus about 4 billion light-years from the Big Bang, but now the star Earendel has been located at a distance of "just" 900 million light-years, so it is 12.9 billion light-years from Hubble!

According to lead researcher Brian Welch of Johns Hopkins University,

At first we did not think it was so far away from the previous farthest star. Usually at these distances entire galaxies look like tiny smudges made up of millions of stars of light. We enlarged and distorted the galaxy that hosts Earendel using distorting lenses to see it clearly.

Earendel was so old that it probably did not have the same materials that make up the stars around us today. Earendel's study will open a window into an era of the Universe about which we do not know much, but it has led to what we see today. Basically all these years are like reading the second chapter and now we will be able to take a look at how it all started.

The research team estimates that Earendel is at least 50 times larger than the Sun and is millions of times brighter than our star.