Farthest Star :
How far can one’s naked eyes see? One mile? Two Miles? Or 10 miles from the highest vantage point?
That sounds like a lot, but brace yourself for how far the Hubble Space Telescope has gazed.
The Hubble Space Telescope has spotted a star named Earendel that’s situated about 12.9 billion light-years away from our planet. This means the light from Earendel traveled almost 13 billion years to touch the eye of Hubble. The light of this farthest start began its journey many billion years before the sun was born.
This makes our naked eyes’ record look less than a speck of dust.
Earendel is now considered the farthest star ever spotted by mankind. And the previous farthest star was some 9 billion light-years away, that’s almost 4 billion light-years less than the new titleholder- Earendel as the farthest star.
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This research report was published in Nature. The scientists stated that studying this farthest star could help in unraveling the mystery of the Universe’s formation and composition during the early time.
Earendel is shining its light from the Universe’s 1st billion years.
“There are the sorts of things that you only hope you could discover,” said astronomer Katherine Whitaker of the University of Massachusetts. She wasn’t involved in the studies.
The astronomers accidentally identified the object while studying Hubble Space Telescope snaps of dozens of clusters of galaxies close to Earth.
These star clusters are so extremely massive that they magnify the light from faraway background celestial objects in a process known as gravitational lensing.
While analyzing the images of one cluster, the researchers noticed a long, thin, red arc. On further analysis, astronomer Brian Welch of John Hopkins University and colleagues realized that this new arc was the warped and amplified light of a galaxy in the background.
And on top of the red arc, they spotted a bright spot that was too small to be a little star cluster or a small galaxy.
“We stumbled into finding that this was a lensed star,” Welch stated in a report on the farthest star.
The team named the object “Earendel” from the old English word meaning “rising star” or “morning star”.
The farthest star is massive, it’s at least 50 times the mass of our sun. But the researchers aren’t fully sure if the value is accurate and on the confirmation that it even is a star without more detailed studies.
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