Ancient matter - which could be a single star or a pair of star systems - could weigh 500 times more than our Sun. It is also millions of times brighter than the Sun and was born when the universe was young.
Hubble's glasses discovered the star by chance. The attraction from the giant galaxies ahead has deformed the space. This creates an effect called an "attractive lens" that extends the star's light tens of thousands of times, making it visible on Hubble devices, scientists told Nature on March 30.
The star's official name is WHL0137-LS, but researchers have nicknamed it "Earendel". The next image from the Hubble glasses confirms that the star's appearance was not temporary, but it had existed in that position for about 3.5 years.
According to computer simulations, it could be a single star or a pair of star systems, not a cluster of stars. Researchers say Earendel is about 900 million years old after the Big Bang explosion, which could make it a part of the first generation of stars in the universe.
"When we look at the universe, we also look back to the past, so these extremely high-resolution observations allow us to understand the building blocks of some of the first galaxies. When the light we see from Earendel was released, the universe was less than a billion years old, just 6% of its current age. At that time, it was 4 billion light years away from the ancient Galaxy. The universe has expanded to now be 28 billion light years away," said co-author of the study Victoria Strait.
