When stars have names and not just numbers, they're usually close - astronomically speaking.
Betelgeuse in Orion or Antares in Scorpio are roughly 600 light years away from us and thus still deep inside our Milky Way.
This is especially true for Aldebaran in the constellation Taurus with 65 light years and Sirius, the brightest fixed star in our sky, with a distance of less than nine light years.
However, the star Earendel, whose discovery was reported in the current issue of
Nature
by a team of astronomers led by Brian Welch and Dan Coe from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore , is so far away that the light that the researchers caught from it with the Hubble Space Telescope have been on the way to us for an unbelievable 12.9 billion years.
It was emitted when the Big Bang was just 900 million years old and the universe was only seven percent of its current age - at the dawn of the cosmos, so to speak.
Hence the name, which is taken from an Old English Advent poem from the early Middle Ages and is not coincidentally reminiscent of the mythical half-Elf Eärendil from JRR Tolkien's "Silmarillion", who wears the morning star as a jewel on his forehead.
A comparatively normal object
Over a period of 12.9 billion years, the light from a source that shines in all directions has become very rarefied.
Normally, astronomers, even with their biggest and best telescopes, have a hard time seeing entire galaxies from such a distance, whose images combine the light of hundreds of billions of individual stars.
And when objects below the caliber of entire galaxies sometimes make themselves noticeable from such enormous distances, then there are absolutely extreme processes behind them, in which masses of matter fall into supermassive black holes and parts of them are bundled along the axes of their vortex movement and accelerated to almost the speed of light.
But Earendel is apparently a comparatively normal star, albeit a very fat one.
The authors of the
Nature
article estimate that it should have at least fifty times the mass of our sun and shine millions of times more intensely.
Such stars are rare - the vast majority of stars in the universe are smaller than our sun - but not uncommon, and such hums are not actually seen over intergalactic distances of this dimension.
In this case, however, the researchers were helped by a coincidence.
Dented Gravity Lens
In fact, Earendel's home galaxy, WHL0137-zD1, is behind a massive galaxy cluster much closer to us - its light only making its way after the Universe was eight billion years old.
Its gravitational field deflected the light from Earendel's distant home galaxy behind, focusing it in places like a lens and distorting its image into a long arc that astronomers called the "Sunrise Arc" because WHL0137-zD1 was too prosaic for them.