Washington Post, 30 March 2022
“A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, there was a large and magnificently brilliant star that shined across the young, expanding universe. The starlight skewed blue. It was the cosmic morning, when everything in the universe was still new, raw, the galaxies still forming not long after the first stars had ignited and lit up the heavens.
The light from that blue star traveled through space for billions of years, and then one day a few thin beams crashed into a polished mirror — the light bucket of the Hubble Space Telescope.
In a report published Wednesday in the journal Nature, a team of astronomers asserts that this is the most distant individual star ever seen. They describe it as 50 to 100 times more massive than our sun, and roughly 1 million times brighter, with its starlight having traveled 12.9 billion years to reach the telescope.
The lead author on the report, Brian Welch, a 27-year-old doctoral candidate at Johns Hopkins University, had the honor of giving the star a name: Earendel. It’s an Old English word, meaning “morning star,” he said. Earendel was found in a young galaxy known as the Sunrise Arc, and “morning star” seemed appropriate, Welch said.”
