Astronomers have discovered the most distant star yet, a super-hot, super-bright giant that formed nearly 13 billion years ago at the dawn of the cosmos.
But this luminous blue star is long gone, so massive that it almost certainly exploded into bits just a few million years after emerging.
Its swift end makes it all the more incredible that an international team spotted it with observations by the Hubble Space Telescope. It takes eons for light emitted from distant stars to reach us.
“We’re seeing the star as it was about 12.8 billion years ago, which puts it about 900 million years after the Big Bang,” said Johns Hopkins University doctoral student and astronomer Brian Welch, lead author of the study published March 30 in the journal Nature.
“We definitely just got lucky.”
Welch nicknamed the star Earendel, an old English name which means ‘morning star’or ‘rising light’.
“A fitting name for a star that we have observed in a time often referred to as ‘cosmic dawn’,” he said.
Sources (Text & pix): Internet/Kids News