“Peoples of the Caucasus! Tsarist generals, landowners and capitalists by fire and sword strangled our freedom and sold out your country to foreign bankers. The Red Army of Soviet Russia vanquished your enemies; it brought you liberation from bondage and the rich. Long live the Soviet Caucasus!”
[written in five languages: Russian, Georgian, Armenian, Azerbaijani, and Kumyk]
Nicknamed “Earendel” (“morning star” in Old English), this star existed within the first billion years after the universe’s birth in the big bang. Earendel is so far away from Earth that its light has taken 12.9 billion years to reach us, far eclipsing the previous single-star record holder whose light took 9 billion years to reach us.
Though Earendel is at least 50 times the mass of our Sun and millions of times as bright, we’d normally be unable to see it from Earth. However, the mass of a huge galaxy cluster between us and Earendel has created a powerful natural magnifying glass. Astronomers expect that the star will be highly magnified for years.
Earendel will be observed by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Webb’s high sensitivity to infrared light is needed to learn more about this star, because its light is stretched to longer infrared wavelengths due to the universe’s expansion.
