NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, a fixture of astronomy for more than three decades, continues to deliver the hits we know and love. Just this week, Hubble broke its own record and managed to spot the most distant individual star ever to be observed—a flicker of light 12.9 billion light-years away that scientists are calling Earendel. “We almost didn’t believe it at first,” Brian Welch, an astronomer at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and lead author of the new findings published in Nature, said in a statement. “Normally at these distances, entire galaxies look like small smudges, with the light from millions of stars blending together,” said Welch. Discerning light from a single object so far away like this has never been accomplished before. The previous record-holding star, detected by Hubble as well in 2018, was only 9 billion light-years away. Observing objects in space really means observing the light that’s traveled those vast distances. So peering at Earen . . . read the full article here.