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NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has established
an extraordinary new benchmark: detecting

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the light of a star that existed within the
first billion years after the universe’s

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birth in the big bang—the farthest individual
star ever seen to date.

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The newly detected star is 12.9 billion light
years away, meaning that the light took 12.9

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billion years to reach Earth.

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The previous record was 9 billion light years
away.

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

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from millions of stars blending together,
but the galaxy hosting this star was magnified

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

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Sunrise Arc.

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Gravitational lensing occurs when a tremendous
mass warps the fabric of space, creating a

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powerful natural magnifying glass that distorts
and greatly amplifies the light from distant

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objects behind it.

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The combined mass of a foreground group of
galaxies created the lens that allowed astronomers

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to see this distant star.

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After studying the galaxy in detail, they
determined that one feature is an extremely

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magnified star that they called Earendel,
which means “morning star” in Old English.

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The research team estimates that Earendel
is at least 50 times the mass of our Sun and

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millions of times as bright, rivaling the
most massive stars known.

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Earendel existed so long ago that it may not
have had all the same raw materials as the

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stars around us today.

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Studying Earendel will be a window into an
era of the universe that we are unfamiliar

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with, but that led to everything we know today.