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Using the NASA Hubble Space Telescope, scientists were able to find the farthest single star ever recorded, and they named it Erendel, which in Old English means “morning star” because it was at the dawn of the universe.
The researchers said that the mass of the blue star is very hot, and that the mass of our Sun is 50 to 100 times that of a million times brighter. Its light travels 12.9 billion years to reach Earth, meaning the star existed when the universe was only seven percent of its current age.
Scientists say Erendel appeared about 900 million years after the Big Bang at the beginning of the universe. It belonged to the first generation of stars before the universe was completely different from what it is today.
Prior to this discovery, a single star, Icarus, was reported to have formed four billion years after Erendel.
Brian Welch said; Although astronomers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and the lead author of research published this week in the journal Nature can now see Erendel’s light on Earth, the star is definitely no longer there because massive stars have relatively short lifespans. Erendel is believed to have lived a few hundred million years before dying in a massive eruption known as a supernova.
“Big stars usually live fast and die young,” Welch added.
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