It is called Earendel and it is the farthest star in the universe ever observed;
just under 13 billion light years away, it was formed about 900 million years after the Big Bang.
Its image was captured by the Hubble Space Telescope and the discovery, published in the journal Nature, is due to the research group led by Brian Welch, of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
The name Earendel derives from the Old English term meaning 'morning star' or 'rising light', a name perfectly suited to this new cosmic object, which turns out to be the farthest single star ever observed, therefore the oldest.
Earendel would have been born when the universe was just 900 million years old.
There are many more distant cosmic objects, such as the galaxy GN-Z11, 13.4 light years away, but they are all 'aggregates' made up of millions of stars so distant that they cannot be distinguished from each other.
A allows the observation of this single star was the microlensing, that is the phenomenon foreseen by the theory of Relativity in which the light coming from a very distant object is 'enlarged' by a third object, with a mass such as to distort the passage of the light, which is located between the source and the observer.
A technique that exploits a certain amount of luck but that more than once in recent years has allowed us to observe very distant objects impossible to see in a 'traditional' form.
According to the researchers, the new star would have a mass of 50 times that of the Sun and could actually be a binary system, made up of two stars.
