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The Hubble

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Space Telescope
has just made an astounding discovery.

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It has made an image of a star
that is so far away from us,

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the light has taken
12.9 billion years to get to us.

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That means that light left the star
when the universe was less

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than 1 billion years old.

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To me, that's amazing, actually,
using Hubble as a time machine

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to see a star that long ago.

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Something that is this far away,

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you're practically at the edge
of our observable universe.

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We normally can't see stars that far away.

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Even seeing galaxies,
which are families of hundreds

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of billions of stars,
is difficult that far away.

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But something really wonderful happened.

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Space and time itself can actually bend
under the influence of gravity.

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This is something that Einstein discovered
100 years ago.

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It's not really much part of our
everyday life around us, but out in space,

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the massive
gravity of a cluster of galaxies

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can actually bend space itself
to focus light to make a lens.

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It's a natural telescope
out of space itself.

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So this star was coincidentally
perfectly aligned so that its light passed

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through this lens that was being made
by a cluster of galaxies.

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The cluster of galaxies is closer to us,
but way behind that,

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the stars perfectly lined up
to be focused by that lens.

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And that's the only reason Hubble
could see it.

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It's actually
being lensed by space itself.

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So the nickname
for the star, I think is wonderful.

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Astronomers are calling it Earendel.

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And that actually means
The Morning Star. You know

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in some ways the first star you see

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because this is fact, is the first star
that we've seen in the universe,

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the farthest away
that the longest and time ago,

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that long ago,
the universe was quite different.

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Amazingly,
all of the stuff that makes me up, things

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like carbon and oxygen and calcium
in my bones,

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everything except hydrogen
and helium was made from dead stars.

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We're looking back to a time

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when that process
hadn't been going on very long at all.

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The universe started really just with
the simplest elements hydrogen helium.

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Everything else got added later.

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So this star has a different chemistry
than what we see around us today.

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It may behave in a very different way.

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So we really want to follow up and
find out everything we can about this star.

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So this is something that astronomers
have been waiting for for decades.

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We now have two amazing space
telescopes up at the same time.

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Hubble is nearly 32 years old
and still making groundbreaking

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discoveries like this. Just mind blowing.

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And then in December,
we launched the James Webb Space Telescope

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Now, having two telescopes up at once
is a wonderful thing because they can

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actually sort of correct each other.
The word is calibrate.

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They can look at the same object
and make sure they're

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making the same types of measurements

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We can really understand
what we're measuring.

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So it's wonderful
that Hubble found the star

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and Hubble will continue
to observe the star.

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But when we have Webb look at it,
Webb has a much larger mirror,

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more sensitive instruments.

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It can find out more about the star.

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It can probably confirm
whether it's a single star

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or a binary star can probably give us
a sense of the temperature of the star.

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So Webb will actually help us find out
a lot more about what Earendel really is,

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what it's like.
But Hubble, after 32 years,

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made a discovery
that's still rewriting the textbooks

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So to find out more about this
astounding observation

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and everything else that the Hubble Space
Telescope is looking at,

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you can go to nasa.gov/Hubble

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or @NASAHubble.

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Right now,
we don't know a lot about the star.

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We don't know whether it's a single star
or a binary star.

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It could even be possibly
a small cluster of stars.

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But what we suspect
is this probably a very massive star.

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The star is probably 50 to 100 times
the mass of the sun.

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Stars like that don't live a long time.

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So we're seeing light from a star
that probably itself

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only lived a couple of million years.

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It blew up long, long ago.

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But that light has just finally reached
our telescopes here at Earth.

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So we know
that the universe has changed over time.

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All of the chemical elements
that make up most of my body, things

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like like carbon and oxygen
and the calcium in my bones, all of that,

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those elements were made later
in the universe from stars

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that actually had to live their lives,

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make those atoms and then explode,
spreading that through the galaxy.

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This star is is so far back in time
that not much of

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that had a chance to happen.

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Chances are, the star is a different
chemical composition from the stars

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around us.

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Fewer of these heavier
elements have been made so far.

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How does a star like that work?

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Does it burn differently, 
does have a different temperature?

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We can find out how stars themselves
changed over time by looking at this

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very, very ancient image of a star
that lived a long time ago.

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This is something that as a scientist,
you know, when you begin

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to read the paper, you sort of like
look twice and you're like, what?

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You know,
we actually saw a star that's so far away,

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the light took 12.9 billion years
to get to us?

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That's something
that really shouldn't be possible.

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It took this wonderful cosmic coincidence.

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Everything was lined up perfectly.

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A nearby cluster of galaxies
was lensing space actually

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bending space into this natural telescope.

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That star was perfectly lined up.

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It was actually magnified thousands
of times the brightness that it should be.

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So it's kind of this wonderful gift
from the universe.

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A chance to look back in time.

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A chance to learn more about where we came
from, what things were like around here.

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Billions and billions of years ago.

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So this is the amazing thing here
is Hubble.

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It's almost 32 years old, and it's up
there making ground breaking discoveries.

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You think about that, a star

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so far away, the light has taken
12.9 billion years to get to us.

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That's something that I never thought
we would see.

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This 32 year old telescope
is still absolutely blowing my mind.