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The farthest star is Earendel

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Earendel


The farthest star is Earendel

 The most distant star or perhaps a pair of stars.  Which astronomers have successfully seen through the activity of the Hubble Telescope and a huge cluster of galaxies.  The star shone just 900 million years after the Big Bang.  The name of a distant star is usually WHL0137-LS (Official (US) Name).  But the astronomers who found it nicknamed it "Earendel" which means "morning star" or "rising light".

 Gravitational magnifying glass

 Far away from Earth, the universe revolves around a large part of a galaxy cluster, creating a gravitational lens like a magnifying glass curved lens in space time.  Just as a magnifying glass can reveal something small and invisible to the naked eye, a magnifying glass created in space has revealed a star system in the first universe.

 According to the authors of the research paper in the journal Nature,

 The Earendel system, as we see it today, was glowing in just 900 million years of the Big Bang.  A total of 12.8 billion years have passed since that light reached the Hubble Space Telescope, magnified by a lucky gravitational technique for Hubble's image sensor to appear as a tiny speck of photons.  Earendel is 8.2 billion years older than the Sun and Earth and 12.1 billion years older than the first creatures on our planet.

 Even by the standards of ancient stars, Erendel is different.  Astronomers observed the previous record holder, Icarus (nickname), which appeared 9.4 billion years ago.  Which is 3.4 billion years more recent than Erendel.  Even the oldest known supernovae, usually the brightest and most easily seen individual objects across the vastness of space, are smaller than the Erendale.

 Erendel's home galaxy, the Sunrise Arc, is named after the gravitational lensing effect that made this discovery possible.

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