The Hubble
Space Telescope has just made an astounding discovery.
It has made an image of a star that is so far away from us,
the light has taken 12.9 billion years to get to us.
That means that light left the star when the universe was less
than 1 billion years old.
To me, that's amazing, actually, using Hubble as a time machine
to see a star that long ago.
Something that is this far away,
you're practically at the edge of our observable universe.
We normally can't see stars that far away.
Even seeing galaxies, which are families of hundreds
of billions of stars, is difficult that far away.
But something really wonderful happened.
Space and time itself can actually bend under the influence of gravity.
This is something that Einstein discovered 100 years ago.
It's not really much part of our everyday life around us, but out in space,
the massive gravity of a cluster of galaxies
can actually bend space itself to focus light to make a lens.
It's a natural telescope out of space itself.
So this star was coincidentally perfectly aligned so that its light passed
through this lens that was being made by a cluster of galaxies.
The cluster of galaxies is closer to us, but way behind that,
the stars perfectly lined up to be focused by that lens.
And that's the only reason Hubble could see it.
It's actually being lensed by space itself.
So the nickname for the star, I think is wonderful.
Astronomers are calling it Earendel.
And that actually means The Morning Star. You know
in some ways the first star you see
because this is fact, is the first star that we've seen in the universe,
the farthest away that the longest and time ago,
that long ago, the universe was quite different.
Amazingly, all of the stuff that makes me up, things
like carbon and oxygen and calcium in my bones,
everything except hydrogen and helium was made from dead stars.
We're looking back to a time
when that process hadn't been going on very long at all.
The universe started really just with the simplest elements hydrogen helium.
Everything else got added later.
So this star has a different chemistry than what we see around us today.
It may behave in a very different way.
So we really want to follow up and find out everything we can about this star.
So this is something that astronomers have been waiting for for decades.
We now have two amazing space telescopes up at the same time.
Hubble is nearly 32 years old and still making groundbreaking
discoveries like this. Just mind blowing.
And then in December, we launched the James Webb Space Telescope
Now, having two telescopes up at once is a wonderful thing because they can
actually sort of correct each other. The word is calibrate.
They can look at the same object and make sure they're
making the same types of measurements
We can really understand what we're measuring.
So it's wonderful that Hubble found the star
and Hubble will continue to observe the star.
But when we have Webb look at it, Webb has a much larger mirror,
more sensitive instruments.
It can find out more about the star.
It can probably confirm whether it's a single star
or a binary star can probably give us a sense of the temperature of the star.
So Webb will actually help us find out a lot more about what Earendel really is,
what it's like. But Hubble, after 32 years,
made a discovery that's still rewriting the textbooks
So to find out more about this astounding observation
and everything else that the Hubble Space Telescope is looking at,
you can go to nasa.gov/Hubble
or @NASAHubble.
Right now, we don't know a lot about the star.
We don't know whether it's a single star or a binary star.
It could even be possibly a small cluster of stars.
But what we suspect is this probably a very massive star.
The star is probably 50 to 100 times the mass of the sun.
Stars like that don't live a long time.
So we're seeing light from a star that probably itself
only lived a couple of million years.
It blew up long, long ago.
But that light has just finally reached our telescopes here at Earth.
So we know that the universe has changed over time.
All of the chemical elements that make up most of my body, things
like like carbon and oxygen and the calcium in my bones, all of that,
those elements were made later in the universe from stars
that actually had to live their lives,
make those atoms and then explode, spreading that through the galaxy.
This star is is so far back in time that not much of
that had a chance to happen.
Chances are, the star is a different chemical composition from the stars
around us.
Fewer of these heavier elements have been made so far.
How does a star like that work?
Does it burn differently, does have a different temperature?
We can find out how stars themselves changed over time by looking at this
very, very ancient image of a star that lived a long time ago.
This is something that as a scientist, you know, when you begin
to read the paper, you sort of like look twice and you're like, what?
You know, we actually saw a star that's so far away,
the light took 12.9 billion years to get to us?
That's something that really shouldn't be possible.
It took this wonderful cosmic coincidence.
Everything was lined up perfectly.
A nearby cluster of galaxies was lensing space actually
bending space into this natural telescope.
That star was perfectly lined up.
It was actually magnified thousands of times the brightness that it should be.
So it's kind of this wonderful gift from the universe.
A chance to look back in time.
A chance to learn more about where we came from, what things were like around here.
Billions and billions of years ago.
So this is the amazing thing here is Hubble.
It's almost 32 years old, and it's up there making ground breaking discoveries.
You think about that, a star
so far away, the light has taken 12.9 billion years to get to us.
That's something that I never thought we would see.
This 32 year old telescope is still absolutely blowing my mind.