Originally published at: This is an image of the farthest star ever detected | Boing Boing
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Planets please. Still sounds more appealing than here, unless they find something further.
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I prefer when Tolkien is used by the good people in this world rather than the billionaire fascists who keep appropriating his names.
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light from roughly 30 billion yearsa very long time ago. (assuming it wasn’t just rendered there as part of the simulation)
fta:
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Thank you! I was about to ask which “dot” in that image is Earendel.
Also, Isn’t 30 billion years > age of the universe, which I thought was about 15-16 billion years?
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… they’re extrapolating how far they believe it is “now,” rather than how far the light has traveled?
Everything is moving away from everything else?
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based solely on the colors
meaning like spectroscopy ? ? 
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It is. This is the “comoving distance” – how far away that point would be now. That’s the easiest way to measure things since the actual distances keep changing. We’re looking at this star long enough ago that the universe was smaller when the light left, and so it didn’t have to travel that whole length – and of course got very stretched out along the way.
Right near the very edge of the observable universe there is the cosmic background radiation, which we are seeing from about 14 billion years ago but with a comoving distance of 46 billion light-years.
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… it’s like a heat index for spacetime 
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The number of galaxies in these Webb photos never ceases to astonish. There’s gotta be trillions of planets in that photo. Almost certainly life on many of them.
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Earendel? What is that, Elvish? Sounds like Quenya to me.
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Apparently per Wikipedia, the star is in fact named after Eärendil, who was raised up to the sky by the Valar at the end of the First Age after he sailed to the Undying Lands and sought the aid of the Great Powers against Morgoth. He sails endlessly across the heavens with a Silmaril as a sign of hope.
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haven’t you seen the documentary?
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Thank you for that – I thought I’d missed some giant cosmological paradigm shift. We better get moving if we want to catch up!
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My brain on seeing that image was like…
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Actually, some of the data from the JWT that have come out in the past year have caused some scientists to re-think the age of the universe, which may actually be 26 billion years old, instead of the 14 we’ve always heard.
Increasing the universe’s age could help explain some long-standing cosmological quandaries, as well as some new ones discovered by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). One of the oldest stars known to science, fittingly named Methuselah is, by some estimates, somehow older than the known universe. Obviously, that is impossible, though margins of error could place it before the Big Bang. And Methuselah isn’t the only cosmological anomaly. New JWST data also revealed at least six galaxies way too massive for how early they formed in the Universe’s past.
It hasn’t been accepted by everyone though, but I know some of these extremely distant stars and well-formed galaxies are hard to explain right now.
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