NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has detected light from a star that existed for the first billion years following the birth of the universe in the Big Bang, the most distant star ever individually observed to date. day.
The discovery is “an extraordinary new step,” NASA said Wednesday.
This newly detected star is so distant that its light took 12.9 billion years to reach Earth, according to NASA.
“We almost mightn’t believe it at first, it was so much further away than the previous most distant star, with the highest redshift,” said astronomer Brian Welch of Johns Hopkins University. in Baltimore, lead author of the paper describing the discovery, published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
This magnified star has been nicknamed “Earendel”, which means “morning star” in Old English.
