Hubble Just Found The Furthest Star Ever In Record-Breaking Discovery
Over 30 years after its launch, Hubble just broke a world record and found the furthest star ever recorded. Stars are a constant and abundant presence in the universe. The Sun is the star we're most familiar with. It sustains life on Earth, is the closest star to us, and is constantly visible in the sky above. But the Sun is just one of billions of stars. Astronomers believe that there may be 200 billion stars scattered across the universe — all with their own unique characteristics.
Along with exploring planets and galaxies, Hubble's also an excellent tool for finding such stars. Earlier this month, NASA shared a Hubble photo of a baby star throwing a stellar tantrum in space. Hubble's also found a black hole burping young stars, a large nebula creating heaps of rare stars, and a dying star living out its final days in the cosmos.
As impressive as those discoveries are, they pale in comparison to what Hubble's done now. On March 30, 2022, NASA announced that Hubble had found the furthest star ever detected — residing 28 billion light-years away from Earth. The star, known now as 'Earendel,' was created at some point during the first billion years of the universe's creation during the big bang. As explained by astronomer Brian Welch, "Earendel existed so long ago that it may not have had all the same raw materials as the stars around us today."
To put into context how far away Earendel is, NASA estimates that it's taken 12.9 billion years for the star's light to finally reach Earth. And that's with its light traveling around 186,000 miles per second through space. It's also substantially further away than Icarus — the previous furthest star whose light took 9 billion years to reach Earth. The way Earendel appears in the Hubble photo looks like it did when the universe was at around 7 percent of its age today. That means Earendel appears to be a very faint and small star, but in reality, that couldn't be further from the truth. NASA believes that Earendel is "at least 50 times the mass of our Sun and millions of times as bright, rivaling the most massive stars known."
Even being such a gigantic star and its light traveling towards Earth for billions of years, Hubble only spotted Earendel thanks to a nearby galaxy cluster. The cluster (known as WHL0137-08) is found somewhere between Earth and Earendel. The enormous mass of the cluster causes it to bend and warp the very fabric of space, thus creating "a powerful natural magnifying glass that distorts and greatly amplifies the light from distant objects behind it." The chances for this cluster to line up so perfectly with Earth and Earendel is incredibly rare, but because of it, Hubble's now made a discovery that'll go down in the history books.
While this is the first sighting of Earendel, it's far from the last time we'll be hearing about the star. NASA plans to further observe Earendel with the James Webb Space Telescope. And thanks to James Webb's heightened sensitivity compared to Hubble, those later observations will confirm Earendel's brightness, temperature, and composition. NASA's often touted James Webb as a sort of time machine, and its findings on Earendel could prove that.
Source: NASA