Earendel
Massive hot B-type star · WHL0137-LS
Most distant individual star ever seen
The most distant individual star ever seen. Its light set out about 12.9 billion years ago, when the universe was a twentieth of its present age, and reaches us only because a massive galaxy cluster bends and magnifies it into view. A single hot, massive star glimpsed across almost the whole history of the cosmos.
Illustration from its stellar type, not a photograph
12.9 billion ly
from Earth
z = 6.2
redshift
Its light has been travelling 12.9 billion years to reach us, so you see Earendel as it was 12.9 billion years ago, early in the history of the universe.
Source · Welch et al. 2022, Nature 603, 815 · View on Wikidata
It lives in
the Sunrise Arc galaxy, gravitationally lensed
Too distant to catalog as a galaxy of its own; visible only because a closer mass bends its light toward us.