Meet ‘Earendel,’ the most distant star ever seen by the Hubble telescope

Earendel is a 'record-breaking' discovery almost 13 billion light-years away from our planet.

The Hubble telescope has made a new and record-breaking discovery. It has spotted the most distant star — or possible group of stars — astronomers have ever seen.

The star is officially named WHL0137-LS. NASA’s astronomers have nicknamed it “Earendel” from the Old English word meaning “morning star” or “rising light.”

According to a NASA press release, the find is a “huge leap, further back in time from the previous single-star record holder” that was detected by Hubble in 2018.

The newly detected star is extremely far away. Its light has taken 12.9 billion years to reach Earth. Scientists say the light currently detectable from Earth is from a time when the universe was only seven per cent of its current age.

To put that into context, researchers say Earendel is 8.2 billion years older than the Sun and Earth and 12.1 billion years older than our planet’s first animals.

“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, who worked on the discovery.