Hubble Telescope Captures Most Distant Star Situated 28 Billion Light-Years Away
Hubble just achieved a mind blowing feat after capturing the most distant star ever. The Hubble Space Telescope got a glimpse at a star situated 28 billion light-years away.
Astronomers say that marks the farthest detection of any star in the history of humankind. What Hubble saw is effectively a ?star from 900 million years after the big bang. It could be about 50 to 500 times bigger than our Sun and even million times brighter.
Unlocking the secrets of universe's birth
The star has been nicknamed "Earendel" - based on an Old English word that means "morning star" or "rising light." A study highlighting the findings was published in the journal Nature on Wednesday.
With this, Hubble has effectively broken its own record from 2018 when it saw a star that existed when the universe was four billion years old.
Earendel is situated so far away from Earth that its starlight has taken 12.9 billion years to reach us and scientists believe this discovery could help astronomers probe the earliest period of our universe.
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"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 study coauthor Victoria Strait, a postdoctoral researcher at the Cosmic Dawn Center in Copenhagen, in a statement.
When Earendel was emitting the light that jus reached us, the universe was less than a billion years old - about "6% of its current age."
At that time it emitted the light, Earendel was 4 billion light years away from the earliest version of Milky Way. The universe has expanded so much that Earendel is now 28 billion light years away.
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Did you know that stars so far away take so long to be detected on Earth? Let us know what you think in the comments below.?For more in the world of?technology?and?science, keep reading?Indiatimes.com.
References
Welch, B. (2022, March 30). A highly magnified star at redshift 6.2. Nature.?
