Record: Hubble discovers star 12.9 billion light-years away

(sda) This is a new record and a huge leap forward: the previous record holder was only four billion light years away. The new record star probably had more than 50 times the mass of our sun and burned up after just a few hundred thousand years, as the discovery team reported in the journal “Nature”.

The astronomers led by Brian Welch from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore named the star “Earendel” – after an Old English word for the morning star. The researchers were able to track down “Earendel” with cosmic support: between the earth and the distant star lies a huge galaxy cluster, which, as a gravitational lens, amplifies the star’s light by a factor of more than a thousand.