The Hubble telescope has detected the most distant star in the history of measurements

The star has been named erendell, which is the old English term for “morning star” or “bright light,” and this time scientists seem to have chosen the perfect term. We are dealing with A star that is 12.9 billion light-years away from EarthWhich was born about 900 million years after the Big Bang and the formation of the universe as we know it.

This distance from Earth means that The star broke the previous record, which is the blue giant named IcarusApproximately 4 billion years ago. However, as scientists point out, the numbers given here can be a bit confusing – the distance from Earth was estimated using the “day” as a reference point, that is, the time it took for the star’s light to reach Earth, but now Earendel is much further away , thanks to the expansion of the universe.

What is very important in this case, So far we haven’t been able to see any single stars from this period Our observations were limited to the combined light of millions or even billions of stars, as it was impossible to distinguish individual celestial bodies.

And we were really lucky here, despite the fact that Earndell It is huge and can have a mass of 50 times the mass of the Sunit was only possible to see thanks to the galaxy cluster WHL0137-08 on the way, and its mass bends space and acts as a magnifying lens.

Astronomers stress that this is a groundbreaking discovery and has the potential to open the way to entirely new research into early star formation — in their opinion, Earndale’s age means it may surprise us. Besides, there is a high probability that we are not dealing with one star, but a system of two, but we will find out only in a few months, when James Webb Space Telescope.