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

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

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

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

00:17The newly detected star is 12.9 billion light-years away,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

00:54creating a powerful natural magnifying glass that distorts and greatly amplifies the light

01:00from distant objects behind it.

01:03The combined mass of a foreground group of galaxies created a lens

01:07that allowed astronomers to see this distant star.

01:11After studying the galaxy in detail,

01:13they determined that one feature is an extremely magnified star that they called Arendelle,

01:19which means Morning Star in Old English.

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

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

01:33Arendelle existed so long ago that it may not have had all the same raw materials

01:38as the stars around us today.

01:41Studying Arendelle will be a window into an era of the universe that we are unfamiliar with,

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

01:52NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology

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