The Hubble Space Telescope has observed the most distant star ever seen – Earendel, meaning morning star. Even though Earendel is 50 times the mass of the Sun, and millions of times brighter, we would not normally be able to see it. We can see it due to an alignment of the star with a large galaxy cluster in front of it whose gravity bends the light from the star to make it brighter and more focused – essentially creating a lens.
Astronomers see into the deep past when we view distant objects. Light travels at a constant speed (3x10⁸ metres per second) so the further away an object is, the longer it takes for the light to reach us. By the time the light reaches us from very distant stars, the light we are looking at can be billions of years old. So we are looking at events that happened in the past.
