Hubble’s Inside the Image: Earendel

Hubble took a breathtaking image of the farthest known star, dubbed Earendel. The star is positioned along a ripple in spacetime that gives it extreme magnification, allowing it to emerge into view from its host galaxy, which appears as a red smear across the sky. This Hubble observation established an extraordinary new benchmark: detecting the light of a star that existed within the first billion years after the Universe’s birth in the Big Bang (at a redshift of 6.2) – the most distant individual star ever seen. In this video, Dr. Brian Welch explains this discovery while outlining how important Hubble is to exploring the mysteries of the universe. Credit: NASA GSFC, Producer: James Leigh