The Hubble Space Telescope never ceases to amaze with its great observational capabilities, in fact today NASA announced that it has observed the farthest star ever.
About 12.9 billion light years away from us, the star was baptized by astronomers "Earendel", the name given by the ancient Anglo-Saxons to the brightest star in the firmament and mentioned several times by Tolkien in his "Lord of the rings".
The star was not observed directly, but thanks to a powerful gravitational lens generated by the cluster of galaxies WHL0137-08. By deforming space-time, the cluster deflected the light emitted by Earendel, amplifying its light, thus allowing Hubble to observe it, despite the great distance.
"At first we almost didn't believe it," said astronomer Brian Welch of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, lead author of the paper describing the discovery. "The star was much farther than the most distant stars ever observed."
Earendel's light comes from the past, and has been traveling towards us for 12.9 billion years, so this star was formed in the early Universe. The authors of the discovery, published today in Nature, do not believe that this is one of the first stars to appear in the Universe, but have estimated that it is millions of times brighter than our star. Earendel also rivals the most massive stars known, as its mass is 50 times that of our Sun.
The baton will now pass to the James Webb Space Telescope, born to observe such distant objects. With his observations it will be possible to confirm the existence of Earendel and reveal his chemical composition, to understand if this exceptional star is one of the first stars in the history of our Universe.
