LOS ANGELES, March 30 (Xinhua) -- NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has detected 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 finding has established an "extraordinary new benchmark," said NASA on Wednesday.
The newly detected star is so far away that its light has taken 12.9 billion years to reach Earth, according to NASA.
"We almost didn't believe it at first, it was so much farther than the previous most-distant, highest redshift star," said astronomer Brian Welch of the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, lead author of the paper describing the discovery, which is published in the journal Nature on Wednesday.
The magnified star has been nicknamed "Earendel," which means "morning star" in Old English.
The discovery holds promise for opening up an uncharted era of very early star formation, said NASA. ■
