Everyone's favorite space telescope continues to amaze:
Thanks to NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have begun studying and measuring the most distant star ever detected, with the most powerful telescope ever built. ...
The star is located so far away that its light has taken 12.9 billion years to reach Earth, appearing to us as it did when the universe was just 7 percent of its current age. ...
Let's see a closeup of that sucker!
What a beauty! I mean, it's a pinprick of light viewed at a legitimately unfathomable distance. Still, it's neat.
Here's the craziest part: The light took "12.9 billion years to reach Earth," but the star itself is estimated to be even more insanely distant from our planet — "over 28 billion light years."
That's because the universe is constantly expanding, and the expansion goes faster at even greater distances. We don't notice the expanding cosmos between us and, say, Mars — it's too small to measure. But put a star 12.9 billion light years away and the expansion gets real fast, real fast.
As an aside, what does it mean for the universe to "expand?" Well, here's the people's encyclopedia, Wikipedia, with an explanation:
The expansion of the universe is the increase in distance between gravitationally unbound parts of the observable universe with time. It is an intrinsic expansion; the universe does not expand "into" anything and does not require space to exist "outside" it.
Well, anyway, sweet pics!!
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