Hubble’s Inside The Image: Earendel

The Hubble Space Telescope has taken over 1.5 million observations over the years. One of them is the breathtaking image of the star known as Earendel.

The star is positioned along a ripple in spacetime that gives it extreme magnification, allowing it to emerge into view from its host galaxy, which appears as a red smear across the sky.

With this observation, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has established an extraordinary new benchmark: detecting the light of a star that existed within the first billion years after the Universe’s birth in the Big Bang (at a redshift of 6.2) — the most distant individual star ever seen.

In this video, Dr. Brian Welch explains this fascinating phenomenon of nature, and goes over how important Hubble is to exploring the mysteries of the universe.


For more information, visit https://nasa.gov/hubble.

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

Producer & Director: James Leigh

Editor: Lucy Lund

Director of Photography: James Ball

Additional Editing & Photography: Matthew Duncan

Executive Producers: James Leigh & Matthew Duncan

Production & Post: Origin Films

Video Credit:
Hubble Space Telescope Animation
Credit: ESA/Hubble (M. Kornmesser & L. L. Christensen), A. Fujii, Robert Gendler, Digitized Sky Survey 2, Panther Observatory, Steve Cannistra, Michael Pierce, Robert Berrington (Indiana University), Nigel Sharp, Mark Hanna (NOAO)/WIYN/NSF

Dark Matter Gravitational Lensing Animation
Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab

Music Credit:
"Transcode" by Lee Groves [PRS], and Peter George Marett [PRS] via Universal Production Music

"Frozen Waves Instrumental" by Matthew Nicholson [PRS], and Suki Jeanette Finn [PRS] via Universal Production Music