HUBBLE SEES THE FARTHEST STAR IN THE UNIVERSE

MARCH 30, 2022, 11:00 AM ET

A gravity assist helps the 'scope see a star 12.9 billion light-years away

By Phil Plait

Staring at the same spot in the sky for the better part of a day, Hubble Space Telescope — aided by a quirk of gravity that can massively magnify distant objects — may have spotted the most distant star ever seen… by a huge margin. If confirmed, the star is nearly 13 billion light years away, and we see it as it was when the Universe was only 900 million years old.

If confirmed, this is the farthest star in the Universe ever seen by humans.

!!!

There are some caveats and such, but even taking those into account this object is terrifically far away and very likely to mark a distance record that won’t be broken for a while.

The star was found in a series of observations made of a cluster of galaxies called WHL 0137–08, located on the sky in the constellation of Cetus. Galaxy clusters can contain dozens to hundreds of galaxies, and WHL 0137-08 is a bruiser: Observations indicate it has a total mass of a whopping 900 trillion times that of the Sun, enough to make a thousand galaxies like the Milky Way.

WHL 0137-08 is about 5.5 billion light years from Earth, over a third of the way across the observable Universe. Still, there’s a lot of real estate on the other side of it, and many galaxies lie beyond. Here’s where the Universe itself helps us out: The gravity of a cluster of galaxies can distort the light coming from even more distant galaxies on its way to us. The distortion can multiply images of images of objects so we see more than one of each, it can warp the shape, and, most importantly here, it can magnify the brightness of the more distant object. This effect is similar to how a lens behaves, so it’s called gravitational lensing.

More:
https://www.syfy.com/syfy-wire/bad-astronomy-farthest-star-ever-seen-almost-13-billion-light-years-away