Hubble Space Telescope detects most distant star ever seen

April 25, 2022

The Hubble Space Telescope’s record of impressive celestial On March 30, 2022, scientists announced that the powerful astronomical observatory had detected the light of a star located about

28 billion light-years away — making it the farthest individual star seen to date.

The ancient star is believed to have formed within a billion years after the universe’s birth during the Big Bang. However, it is not the oldest star ever to be discovered. That honour belongs to a star dubbed Methuselah, which is believed to date back an astonishing 14.5 billion years, or about the same age as our universe.

The team, led by Brian Welch, a doctoral student at Johns Hopkins University, has nicknamed the distant star Earendel, an old English word for “morning star” or “rising light.” They estimate it was between 50 and 500 times as massive as our Sun and millions of times as bright. The researchers’ calculations indicate that Earendel’s light took 12.9 billion years to reach Earth.