The most distant star ever discovered may have been misclassified: Instead of being a single star, the object — nicknamed Earendel from the Old English word for "morning star" — may be a star cluster, a group of stars that are bound together by gravity and formed from the same cloud of gas and dust, new research suggests.
Discovered by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2022, Earendel was thought to be a star that formed merely 900 million years after the Big Bang, when the universe was only 7% of its current age.
