Earlier this year, a team of astronomers at Johns Hopkins University led by Brian Welch, a PhD candidate, discovered the most distant known star ever recorded. While the discovery itself is incredible, and has been widely reported on for the past month and a half, there was one thing in particular that caught my attention: the star is named after a character from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion. There’s a reason for that. But first, it’s important to discuss how the star — named “Earendel” — was actually discovered.
The first thing to know about Earendel is that its light takes approximately 12.9 billion years to reach Earth. To put this into context: the previous record-holder, Icarus, takes 9.4 billion years. The difference between those two figures is equal to over 75% of the Earth’s lifetime — it is unimaginably colossal.
“This large jump in distance is likely a coincidence. Finding gravitationally lensed stars is still a fairly new thing, so not many people are actively looking,” Welch tells IGN. Gravitational lensing is an effect that occurs when light travels through space that has been distorted by a massive object, and can magnify the image of those areas of space seen here on Earth. “I was focusing on some highly magnified distant galaxies, so I happened to find an extremely magnified distant star,”
At the time of discovery, he was studying the Sunrise Arc, which is the galaxy Earendel calls home. For some reason, all of his research kept predicting a single point here while he was working from an office in his basement back in 2020 — two years later, Earendel was revealed to the world.