How Did Hubble Spot The Most Distant Star Yet?

Space.com

The Hubble Space Telescope has captured imagery of the most distant single star found yet. It took the light from the star 12.9 billion light years to reach Earth. Learn how it was discovered.  Credit; NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

Transcript

00:00 NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has established an extraordinary new benchmark,

00:05 detecting the light of a star that existed within the first billion years after the universe's birth in the Big Bang,

00:12 the farthest individual star ever seen to date.

00:16 The newly detected star is 12.9 billion light-years away,

00:21 meaning that the light took 12.9 billion years to reach Earth.

00:25 The previous record was 9 billion light-years away.

00:30 Normally, at these distances, entire galaxies look like small, dim smudges

00:35 with the light from millions of stars blending together.

00:39 But the galaxy hosting this star was magnified and distorted by gravitational lensing

00:45 into a long crescent that astronomers named the Sunrise Arc.

00:49 Gravitational lensing occurs when a tremendous mass warps the fabric of space,

00:54 creating a powerful natural magnifying glass that distorts and greatly amplifies the light from distant objects behind it.

01:02 The combined mass of a foreground group of galaxies created a lens that allowed astronomers to see this distant star.

01:10 After studying the galaxy in detail, they determined that one feature is an extremely magnified star

01:17 that they called a "Rendelle," which means "morning star" in Old English.

01:23 The research team estimates that a Rendelle is at least 50 times the mass of our Sun

01:28 and millions of times as bright, rivaling the most massive stars known.

01:33 A Rendelle existed so long ago that it may not have had all the same raw materials as the stars around us today.

01:40 Studying a Rendelle will be a window into an era of the universe that we are unfamiliar with,

01:46 but that led to everything we know today.

01:49 [ Music ]

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