| NASA's Hubble telescope has smashed records by observing the farthest individual star ever seen, having detected light from a star that took 12.9 billion years to reach Earth. Nicknamed "Earendel," this newly detected star emitted its light during the first billion years of our universe when the universe was only 7 percent of its current age, at redshift 6.2, per NASA. Astronomers use redshifts to measure how the universe is expanding and to determine how far away an object is from Earth by looking at the "shift" in wavelengths. Earendel, which means "morning star" in Old English, has become the most distant individual star to ever be seen by quite a significant margin as the previous single-star record holder, detected by Hubble in 2018, existed when the universe was about 4 billion years old, or 30 percent of its current age, at redshift 1.5, with its light taking 9 billion years to reach Earth. NASA shared an annotated view of Earendel's position along "a ripple in space-time (dotted line) that magnifies it and makes it possible for the star to be detected over such a great distance." There was a huge galaxy cluster sitting between the star and Earth, which created a powerful natural magnifying glass for the celestial objects behind it. Having examined the star, the research team estimated that Earendel is at least 50 times the mass of our sun and millions of times as bright, rivalling the most massive stars known. For comparison purposes, it's worth noting that the mass of the sun is 1.989 x 1030 kilograms, which Space.com estimates to be about 333,000 times the mass of the Earth. "Normally at these distances, entire galaxies look like small smudges, with the light from millions of stars blending together," said Brian Welch, an astronomer at Johns Hopkins University and lead author of the paper. "The galaxy hosting this star has been magnified and distorted by gravitational lensing into a long crescent that we named the Sunrise Arc." The discovery was made by observing data collected during Hubble's RELICS (Reionization Lensing Cluster Survey) program, led by co-author Dan Coe. It is understood that follow-up observations will now take place, using NASA's new infrared James Webb Space Telescope to investigate Earendel's brightness, temperature, and composition. "Studying Earendel will be a window into an era of the universe that we are unfamiliar with, but that led to everything we do know," Welch added, speaking of the extraordinary new benchmark that has been set. "It's like we've been reading a really interesting book, but we started with the second chapter, and now we will have a chance to see how it all got started." Welch noted that Earendel may not have had all of the same raw materials as the stars around us today and that if it's found to be made up of primordial hydrogen and helium, then it would offer the first evidence of the Population III stars — which are "hypothesized to be the very first stars born after the big bang," though he admits the probability of that is low. NASA recently celebrated another cosmic milestone, having added 65 more planets to the space agency's Exoplanet Archive, bringing the total number of confirmed, detectable planets beyond our solar system to over 5,000, with many of those planets having been detected by using powerful telescopes, both in space and on the ground. Astronomers previously discovered 139 new "minor planets" in the far reaches of our solar system, just beyond Neptune's orbit. The vast expanse of the galaxy also plays host to a free-floating world without a host star, a "hell planet" that is strangely similar to Darth Vader's lava homeworld of Mustafar, and a Super-Earth that's nearly as old as the universe itself. Adele Ankers-Range is a freelance writer for IGN. Follow her on Twitter. Thumbnail image credit: Space Telescope Science Institut/NASA, ESA, B. Welch (JHU) and D. | 
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