Hubble's stellar discovery given a Tolkien-inspired name
In Old English, Earendel is a personal name, but it also can mean"the morning star" or"the dawn." In the Lord of the Rings, Eärendil is a half-elven character who travels the seas carrying a jewel, a"Silmaril," called the morning star.
"It means the dawn star, and it's an Old English word. It's lovely. And this is a star, literally, from the dawn of time, the dawn of stars forming," Thaller said about the star's name."This is the first star, the farthest star we've ever seen, and I think Earendel is a beautiful name for it." "We suspect it's not the absolute first generation of stars," she added."We think that maybe this is one of the subsequent ... maybe a couple tens of millions of years after star formation began [in the universe]."
But, while this distant star, which lies a whopping 12.9 billion light-years from Earth, might not be from the absolute first generation of stars in existence, it is the most distant single star ever found, so the name seems quite fitting.
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