Earendel's light too 12.9 billion years to reach Earth, according to NASA.
The Hubble Space telescope has captured the light from the most distant star ever seen. A releases posted on the website of American space agency NASA said that the star nicknamed Earendel existed within the first billion years after the universe's birth in the big bang.
“The newly detected star is so far away that its light has taken 12.9 billion years to reach Earth, appearing to us as it did when the universe was only 7 percent of its current age,” NASA said in the release published on Wednesday.
Earendel means “morning star” in old English.
The NASA release further said that the previous record was held by a star, which was detected by Hubble in 2018. That star existed when the universe was about 4 billion years old, or 30 percent of its current age, NASA added.
A paper on the discovery has been published in Nature.
“Studying Earendel will be a window into an era of the universe that we are unfamiliar with, but that led to everything we do know. It's like we've been reading a really interesting book, but we started with the second chapter, and now we will have a chance to see how it all got started,” said Brian Welch of the Johns Hopkins University and lead author of the paper.
According to the research team, Earendel is at least 50 times the mass of the Sun and millions of times as bright, rivaling the most massive stars known.
The team had to magnify the galaxy cluster WHL0137-08 where it is located.
The star will soon be observed by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope. The research team said that Webb's high sensitivity to infrared light is needed to learn more about Earendel, “because its light is stretched to longer infrared wavelengths due to the universe's expansion”.
Webb will confirm that Earendel is indeed a star, as well as measure its brightness and temperature, said co-author of the study Dan Coe.