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On Saturday, April 2, NASA announced that Hubble broke the record for the farthest star ever discovered. Designated WHL0137-LS, it has been named Earendel, which means "morning star" in old English. The name also comes from a half-elven character in J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy. This star existed less than a billion years after the Big Bang and the light took 12.9 billion years to reach us. The star would have not been discovered if it had not been magnified by a galaxy cluster. The previous record-breaking star, which existed about 4 billion years after the Big Bang, was also discovered by Hubble in 2018. NASA plans to continue studying Earendel using the James Webb Space Telescope, which launched last December and is currently being prepared to start taking images. With Webb, NASA also plans to investigate the stellar spectrum of the star, which may show us whether earlier stars had different compositions than stars today. Learn more about Earendel's discovery in this NASA feature: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2022/record-broken-hubble-spots-farthest-star-ever-seen.
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