The light of the star has taken 12.9 billion years to reach Earth. Credit: NASANASA said on Wednesday that its Hubble Space Telescope detected the farthest individual star ever seen to date that existed within the first billion years after the universe’s birth in the big bang.
The American space agency said that the newly detected star is so far away that its light has taken 12.9 billion years to reach Earth, appearing to us as it did when the universe was only 7 percent of its current age, at redshift 6.2.
NASA’s Hubble makes a breakthrough
The smallest objects previously seen at such a great distance are clusters of stars, embedded inside early galaxies.
“We almost didn’t believe it at first, it was so much farther than the previous most-distant, highest redshift star,” said astronomer Brian Welch of the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, lead author of the paper describing the discovery, which is published in the March 30 journal Nature.
The NASA discovery was made from data collected during Hubble’s RELICS (Reionization Lensing Cluster Survey) program, led by co-author Dan Coe at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), also in Baltimore.
