Hubble spots most distant single star ever seen, at a record distance of 28 billion lightyears

The star had (a very long time ago) a mass something like 500 times that of the sun. it was only visible thanks to gravitational lensing; the galaxy it occupied was smeared into a long arc due to an intervening mass. The star of course only appears as a single pixel (likely less than that); a fair question is “how can they tell it’s a single star rather than a small galaxy or cluster?” The star has a simple spectrum, where a number of stars would have a much more complex spectrum.

A second valid question: “How can something be 28 billion lightyears away if the universe is 13 or so billion years old?” The complication is that the Universe has been expanding for all of those 13 billion years; the furthest visible extents are expanding at just about the speed of light. The actual *things* are not moving at the speed of light… space itself is expanding. The universe *beyond* what’s visible is expanding at *beyond* the speed of light. This video helps explain this feature of the universe.

The star has been named “Earendel,” the Old English word for “morning star.” To compare with the character of Eärendil  from the Silmarillion.