THE Hubble Space Telescope has glimpsed the most distant single star it’s ever observed, glimmering 28 billion lightyears away. And the star could be between 50 to 500 times more massive than our sun, and millions of times brighter.

It’s the farthest detection of a star yet, from 900 million years after the big bang. Astronomers have nicknamed the star Earendel, derived from an Old English word that means “morning star” or “rising light.”

This observation breaks the record set by Hubble in 2018 when it observed a star that existed when the universe was around four billion years old. Earendel is so distant that the starlight has taken 12.9 billion years to reach us.

This observation of Earendel could help astronomers to investigate the early years of the universe. “As we peer into the cosmos, we also look back in time, so these extreme high-resolution observations allow us to understand the building blocks of some of the very first galaxies,” said Victoria Strait, a postdoctoral research at the Cosmic Dawn Center in Denmark.

“When the light that we see from Earendel was emitted, the universe was less than a billion years old, only 6% of its current age. At that time it was 4 billion lightyears away from the proto-Milky Way, but during the almost 13 billion years it took the light to reach us, the universe has expanded so that it is now a staggering 28 billion lightyears away.”

The alignment of a massive cluster of galaxies acted like a magnifying glass and intensifying the light of Earendel thousands of times. This gravitational lensing, combined with nine hours of observation time on Hubble and an international team of astronomers, created the record-breaking image.

“Normally at these distances, entire galaxies look like small smudges, with the light from millions of stars blending together,” said Brian Welch, astronomer at the Johns Hopkins University.

To ensure that this truly is a single star, rather than two located very close to one another, the research team will use the recently launched James Webb Space Telescope to observe Earendel. Webb could also reveal the temperature and mass of the star.

Astronomers want to know more about the star’s composition because it was formed early after the universe began. Webb could reveal if Earendel is largely made of primordial hydrogen and helium, making it a Population III star, the stars hypothesized to exist shortly after the big bang.(SD-Agencies)