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The Hubble Space Telescope has added yet another remarkable discovery to its legacy: It has spotted the farthest star ever found, a star that began to emit light within the first billion years after the big bang. The star is so far away that its light takes 12.9 billion years to reach Earth. 

Hubble spotted the star WHL0137-LS, nicknamed “Earendel,” which is Old English for “morning star” or “rising light,” with a combination of its powerful instruments and lucky cosmic alignment. The mass of a huge galaxy cluster, called WHL0137-08, warped space through an effect called gravitational lensing. That distorted portion of the cosmos magnified the distant star’s light, and Hubble was in the right place to get a glimpse. The findings were published Wednesday in Nature. 

“It’s by far the most distant individual star that we’ve ever seen,” NASA’s Jane Rigby, a co-author of the paper, told National Geographic. “This will be our best chance to study what an individual, massive star was like in the early universe.”

Earendel’s light, as Hubble observed it, was shining within 900 million years after the big bang, at a time called “redshift 6.2”. The discovery is a major leap from the next-farthest star ever detected, which existed at “redshift 1.5,” when the universe was around 4 billion years old.

The star was so much farther than the previous most-distant star, “we almost didn’t believe it at first,” astronomer Brian Welch of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and lead author of the paper said in a statement. Studying Earendel has the potential to teach astronomers more about how earlier stars differ from newer, younger stars, he added. 

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“Earendel existed so long ago that it may not have had all the same raw materials as the stars around us today,” Welch said. “Studying Earendel will be a window into an era of the universe that we are unfamiliar with, but that led to everything we do know. It’s like we’ve been reading a really interesting book, but we started with the second chapter, and now we will have a chance to see how it all got started.”

In a gravitational lens, warped space causes a natural magnifying glass. Magnification is the most intense along a line called the “critical curve.” The critical curve lined up so well that it intensified Earendel’s light by a factor of 1,000 to 40,000 times. Even so, the star appeared like a smudge to Hubble. Welch and his team have been poring over readings for that smudge of light for the last three and a half years.

“It’s sort of pretty amazing to find this,” Garth Illingworth, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz who was not involved in this research, told NPR. “It’s remarkable to find an object like that right on the most highly magnified part. That, in itself, is sort of an astonishing discovery.”

Earendel is 8.2 billion years older than our solar system, and at least 50 times more massive than our sun. But the team of astronomers is unsure whether Earendel is just one star, or actually a pair of binary stars. The team plans to conduct follow-up observations with NASA’s recently launched James Webb Space Telescope. Luckily, Earendel is expected to stay in that high-magnification zone for years to come.

“With Webb, we may see stars even farther than Earendel, which would be incredibly exciting,” Welch said. “We’ll go as far back as we can. I would love to see Webb break Earendel’s distance record.”

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This article originally appeared on Popular Science

The James Webb Space Telescope’s main mirror segments are fully aligned, and now this NASA telescope is able to produce the highest resolution infrared images ever taken from space. 

NASA released the first picture from the fully aligned telescope on Wednesday, showing the star 2MASS J17554042+6551277. Though other telescopes have previously photographed the star, the James Webb Space Telescope captured it with higher resolution. The telescope also detected other stars and galaxies in the background. These are called “deep field” images. 

“This is going to be the future from now on,” said Jane Rigby, Webb operations project scientist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, according to Space.com. “Wherever we look, it’s a deep field. Without even really breaking a sweat, we’re seeing back in time to galaxies that we’re seeing the light as it looked billions of years ago.”

It’s a feat that would be impossible had the space telescope’s 18 mirror segments not been aligned precisely. Those 18 hexagonal segments make up Webb’s 21.3-foot-wide primary mirror. These hexagons had to travel to space folded—the mirror could only be unfolded after the telescope reached its targeted Lagrange point, 930,000 miles from Earth. There, it unfurled its sun shield and other components. 

Aligning Webb’s many mirror segments was no small task, especially in the extreme conditions of space.  This was achieved by finely controlling multiple motors behind each segment. It was a crucial phase and a big milestone, allowing NASA to produce images with unprecedented clarity, as it did this week. 

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“We have exceeded every expectation,” Scott Acton, Webb’s lead wavefront sensing and control scientist, said in a video on the telescope’s official YouTube channel. “The telescope has performed better than the models said it should.”

The $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope mission is the most complex and expensive observatory of its kind ever launched into space. It has been decades in the making, and so these advancements have been highly anticipated.

“More than 20 years ago, the Webb team set out to build the most powerful telescope that anyone has ever put in space and came up with an audacious optical design to meet demanding science goals,” Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate administrator of science, said in a statement. “Today we can say that design is going to deliver.”

There are still a few alignment steps to go for the optical telescope, and then the team will prep the science instruments on Webb. NASA says Webb’s first full-resolution imagery and science data will be released in the summer. Once all of its instruments are fully operational, the James Webb Space Telescope should help astronomers unravel some of the universe’s biggest mysteries.

“Of all the sleepless nights I’ve had and the worries that I’ve had, they are all behind us now,” said Zurbuchen, according to Space.com. “There’s still a mountain to climb, those important tasks that need to be done. But we are way up that mountain.”

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