NASA Astronomy Ireland Interview
On March 31st 2022 Astronomy Ireland’s Lian Fernandes did an interview with NASA Astronomer Michelle Thaller live from the Goddard Space Science Centre in California. The amazing Hubble Space Telescope had recently spotted the most distant star ever found by a telescope!
Here Lian asks Michelle about the Hubble’s record breaking new discovery.
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has 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 – the farthest individual star ever seen to date.
The find is a huge leap further back in time from the previous single-star record holder; detected by Hubble in 2018. That star existed when the universe was about 4 billion years old, or 30 percent of its current age, at a time that astronomers refer to as “redshift 1.5.” Scientists use the word “redshift” because as the universe expands, light from distant objects is stretched or “shifted” to longer, redder wavelengths as it travels toward us.
The newly detected star is so far away that its light has taken 12.9 billion years to reach Earth, appearing to us as it did when the universe was only 7 percent of its current age, at redshift 6.2. The smallest objects previously seen at such a great distance are clusters of stars, embedded inside early galaxies. Credit NASA
Read more about this record breaking discovery HERE