Hubble Telescope Finds Most Distant Star Ever Seen

The Hubble Telescope has just located a star that’s 12.9 billion light-years away. Find out why this discovery offers new insights into how our Universe began.

When I began stargazing with a telescope decades ago, one of the things that struck me was that looking out into space also means looking back in time. Because the speed of light is fixed, there’s a travel time between the origin of an object’s light and when that light arrives here on Earth.

That lag time is only about a second when we look at the moon. Even for a distant planet like Saturn, it only amounts to roughly an hour-and-a-half.

Even so, it can get mind-blowing when we look outside our Solar System. For example, the light from a nebula in the constellation Orion is 1,350 years old once it hits my eyeball. The light from the Andromeda Galaxy, the Milky Way’s nearest neighbour, is more than 2.5 million years old.

Furthest, and Therefore Oldest Star We’ve Ever Seen

This week, the science journal Nature reported that the Hubble Telescope has left all those distances in the dust. It broke its own record by finding the furthest, and therefore the oldest, star…