Farthest-Away Star Discovered, Was 50 Times Bigger Than Sun And Burned A Million Times Brighter
The farthest, oldest star anyone has ever seen has been discovered by a team of astronomers. The star took form at the beginning of the cosmos, burned super hot and shone bright, and is now very dead, a team of scientists said in a report published today in the journal Nature.
According to the AP, the star formed about 12.8 billion years ago, which would be around 900 million years after the Big Bang, John Hopkins doctoral student Brian Welch said. Previously, the record-owner for most faraway star observed by humans was Icarus, which formed about 9.4 billion years ago.
Welch nicknamed the star Earendel, which means «morning star» or «rising light.» It's also seemingly the inspiration for the Lord of the Rings character Eärendil, the father of Elrond known for carrying a star across the sky.
Earendel the star likely exploded into many pieces only a few million years after it formed, the report said. Welch said the team of astronomers «just got lucky» in spotting the star from the Hubble Space Telescope. That's in part because it can take «eons» for light from far-away stars to reach human visibility.
The star is estimated to have been about 50 times the size of the Earth's sun and 1 million times brighter. The galaxy it belonged to bears little resemblance to the spiral galaxies photographed in the past by Hubble, Welch said. Instead, Welch said this star's galaxy was «kind of an awkward-looking clumpy object.»
For more, you can read Welch's paper on the star in the journal Nature.
The discovery of this new, very far-away and very dead star comes as the US government has disclosed more and more information about UFOs and how some sightings cannot be explained.
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