Hubble telescope detects most distant star ever seen, near cosmic dawn

[BumRushDaShow]

Source: Washington Post

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, there was a large and magnificently brilliant star that shined across the young, expanding universe. The starlight skewed blue. It was the cosmic morning, when everything in the universe was still new, raw, the galaxies still forming not long after the first stars had ignited and lit up the heavens.

The light from that blue star traveled through space for billions of years, and then one day a few thin beams crashed into a polished mirror — the light bucket of the Hubble Space Telescope. In a report published Wednesday in the journal Nature, a team of astronomers asserts that this is the most distant individual star ever seen. They describe it as 50 to 100 times more massive than our sun, and roughly 1 million times brighter, with its starlight having traveled 12.9 billion years to reach the telescope.

The lead author on the report, Brian Welch, a 27-year-old doctoral candidate at Johns Hopkins University, had the honor of giving the star a name: Earendel. It’s an Old English word, meaning “morning star,” he said. Earendel was found in a young galaxy known as the Sunrise Arc, and “morning star” seemed appropriate, Welch said. “And it sounds cool,” he added. Moreover, “Earendil” is the name of a character in J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Silmarillion,” which also inspired the name, Welch said.

“This is one of the major discoveries of the Hubble Space Telescope in its 32 years of observation,” said Rogier Windhorst, an Arizona State University astronomer and a co-author of the report. Found in the constellation Cetus near the star Mira, Earendel’s light was emitted about 900 million years after the universe began its expansion — the big bang. If that estimated distance holds up to further scrutiny, the starlight would have been emitted nearly 4 billion years further back in the universe’s history than that of the most distant individual star previously seen.

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2022/03/30/most-distant-star/

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Link to tweet

Hubble
@NASAHubble
RECORD BROKEN: Hubble observed the farthest individual star ever seen!

This extraordinary new benchmark detected light from a star that existed within the first billion years after the universe's birth in the big bang.

Find out more: https://go.nasa.gov/3tRj5cP
11:08 AM · Mar 30, 2022

Hubble took a licking and keeps on ticking! Congrats!

ETA - here is the publication in Nature - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04449-y

[Stuart G]

1. K and R...Thanks for posting..

[Sneederbunk]

2. Difficult for star to order pizza. Always cold before it gets there.

[BumRushDaShow]

6. "Difficult for star to order pizza. Always cold before it gets there."

Not if it passes too close to one of those primordial stars.

[Achilleaze]

3. The Blue Star

Hmmmm?

[3auld6phart]

4. Woof

Failing eyesight here. Had my magnifying glass on the
video. Magnificent ending almost took my breath away
Really interesting. Raises the question, what was here
before the Big bang.. Totally mind boggling.

[Alpeduez21]

20. Carl Sagan had an answer to that question.

He said, it just doesn't matter. The contents of the big bang are completely outside any frame of reference we have. Nor would we be able to describe it. As far as before the big bang goes there is no way we can know what existed before we have any knowledge of anything.

Sometimes I think this universe existed before the big bang. It goes like this: big bang happened. Universe and everything happened. Universe eventually collapses back upon itself. Another big bang happens. Maybe it happened just this once, maybe 7 times, maybe 400,000,000 times. We just don't know.

It is a pretty cool image, though.

[marie999]

25. Because of dark matter and dark energy, our universe is expanding.

The universe is not only expanding but it is expanding faster. All the galaxies are moving away from each other. Eventually, there won't be any new stars and all the stars will go dark. That could be in 10 to 3,000 power years or 1 with 3,000 zeros.

[3auld6phart]

26. Agreed

Explode,implode forever and a day. At the end of the day it matters not.
It’s a puzzle for astronomers and theoretical mathematicians to think about
it.

[Lasher]

5. What wonders will Webb reveal?

These are exciting times.

[Javaman]

7. I wonder if that galaxy still even exists.

we'll never know.

[muriel_volestrangler]

13. As a galaxy, I think so. But this star will have gone supernova, long ago.

I don't think there's any theory that galaxies break up - once gravity has bound the matter that closely, there's nothing that would take it apart (a collision with another galaxy could be said to form a new one from the two, I suppose). But large stars like this reach the end of their life far quicker than the Sun (which could have a total life of fusion of about 10 billion years), and become either neutron stars or black holes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernova#Core_collapse

[CrispyQ]

8. Exciting stuff! Love Hubble!

If only we spent more money on stuff like this instead of stuff that blows up once & is gone.

[Delphinus]

9. This

lifts my spirits.

[NQAS]

10. So that was the big announcement?

Ok.

No aliens?

No earth killing inter-galaxy asteroid?

That distant star thing is pretty amazing, I guess. I can’t even begin to understand how scientists can calculate that the bit of light that hit the telescope travelled 12.9 billion years, possibly less than a billion years from the the Big Bang itself that resulted in the universe being formed.

[BumRushDaShow]

12. I saw that thread yesterday

and was chuckling when I posted this.

[SergeStorms]

18. Yawn.....

yeah, when they get it whittled down to a couple of days after the big-bang wake me up, will you?

[greenjar_01]

11. The way we look at a distant constellation that's dying in a corner of the sky...

[SergeStorms]

17. There are no corners in the sky.

Just infinity in every direction.

[aeromanKC]

14. Cue Webb in 3,2,1.........

Just a little over 2 months away!!

[twodogsbarking]

15. Did The Rothschilds pay for this?

Can it see The Flintstones when they were alive?

Lara, are you there?

[TeamProg]

16. Thanks for posting. n/t

[LudwigPastorius]

19. That's awesome, but have they seen...

attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion bright as magnesium? Or, C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate?

[getagrip_already]

21. Nasa is all skin jobs, so maybe....

They've been around ya know.

[LudwigPastorius]

22. heh

[BumRushDaShow]

24. This one would know

the answer...

[BobTheSubgenius]

23. Brian Welch has just had the greatest honour he's ever likely to have in his career.

And at the age of 27. Good on him!!!