A star is reborn: how Hubble astronomers saw the earliest light

A tiny smudge on the space telescope turned out to be starlight from Earendel, almost 13 billion years old - revealing evidence of the universe in its infancy

Earendel - morning star" in Old English - is among the first stars to exist in our universe, born less than one billion years after the Big Bang. And the Hubble space telescope has just performed the remarkable feat of detecting light from it.

Mostly, the telescope gives us images of nearby galaxies in intricate detail, but those of distant galaxies are very murky indeed. Astronomer Brian Welch and his team, from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, discovered the star while hunting for hints of the earliest galaxies. These galaxies are very hard to see, and the team chose to examine a selection of images from the Hubble looking for clues.