Hubble telescope sets a new benchmark, detecting the farthest star yet, nicknamed Earendel, which formed nearly 13 billion years ago at the dawn of the cosmos
The previous record-holder, Icarus, also a blue supergiant star spotted by Hubble, formed 9.4 billion years ago. That's more than 4 billion years after the Big Bang.
While Hubble has spied galaxies as far away as 300 million to 400 million years of the universe-forming Big Bang, their individual stars are impossible to pick out. Placco said based on the Hubble data, Earendel may well have been among the first generation of stars born after the Big Bang. Future observations by the newly launched James Webb Space Telescope should provide more details, he said, and "provide us with another piece of this cosmic puzzle that is the evolution of our universe."Current data indicate Earendel was more than 50 times the size of our sun and an estimated 1 million times brighter, outsizing Icarus.
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