Faraway from Earth in the Sunrise Arc galaxy lies a star so distant that it took 12.9 billion years for its light to reach our planet. Named Earendel, after a character from J.R.R Tolkien’s Silmarillion, this star is the most distant ever observed by scientists and is now a mind-boggling 28 billion light years from Earth.
An Astonishing Star Discovery
Earendel dates back to the first billion years after the big bang, offering researchers a glimpse of stars from this time in the Universe’s history. There was a whole lot of serendipity involved in this particular discovery, says Brian Welch, an astronomer at the University of Maryland/NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, who was part of the team that spotted the distant star in 2022 using the Hubble telescope.
“Typically, galaxies that we see at this distance look like faint little dots,” he says.
