It takes 12.9 billion years for light from the star, Earendel, to reach Earth.
The Hubble Space Telescope has added yet another remarkable discovery to its legacy: It has spotted the farthest star ever found, a star that began to emit light within the first billion years after the big bang. The star is so far away that its light takes 12.9 billion years to reach Earth.
The star Earendel’s position along a ripple in space-time , which magnified the star and allowed Hubble to detect it.Earendel’s light, as Hubble observed it, was shining within 900 million years after the big bang, at a time called “redshift 6.2”. The discovery is a major leap from the next-farthest star ever detected, which existed at “redshift 1.5,” when the universe was around 4 billion years old.
“Earendel existed so long ago that it may not have had all the same raw materials as the stars around us today,” Welch said. “Studying Earendel will be a window into an era of the universe that we are unfamiliar with, but that led to everything we do know. It’s like we’ve been reading a really interesting book, but we started with the second chapter, and now we will have a chance to see how it all got started.”In a gravitational lens, warped space causes a natural magnifying glass.