At 12.9 billion light-years, Hubble discovered the most distant star: Earendel, an individual star that may have been born 900 million years after the Big Bang and would be our closest connection to a younger universe.
A new and exciting panorama opens before astronomical exploration and somehow this is present in the name of this star. Originating in Old English, Earendel means «rising light» or «morning star,» a perfect description for the brightness of the star that possibly gave birth to what we know today as the universe.
But where does Earendel come from?
Earendel’s origin does not come only from Old English, it is said that Earendil is in fact a character from JRR Tolkien’s Middle-earth legendarium. A half-elf, son of man and elves who was a sailor.
As the story goes, Eärendil is a great navigator who on his forehead carries the morning star, a jewel known as Silmaril, across the sky. Within these stories, the Silmarils and the Morning Stars are symbols of light, of divine creativity.
Tolkien took the name Eärendil from the Old English Eärendel, which appears in the poem Crist A or Christ I. A poem that belongs to the collection of writings on the coming of the Lord that are kept in the Exeter Book, also known as the poetry codex that is part of the four main manuscripts of ancient English poetry.
Within these writings, Earendel appears as the brightest of angels and that was enough for JRR Tolkien to reserve a place for this character in the mythology of Middle-earth. But the story about the sailor Eärendil also appears in the Lord of the Rings as a song composed and sung by Bilbo Baggins.
Earendel in Lord of the Rings
In fiction, Bilbo tells how in the first age of Middle-earth the sailor Eärendil sets sail to a place in paradise and gets a silmaril, the prized jewel of the sun. Afterwards, the sailor along with his ship are set up in the sky to sail forever like the light of the morning star.
From this story, we could perfectly say that NASA discovered Eärendel, the wandering sailor who carries the light of divine creativity. But that’s only if you believe in JRR Tolkien’s world, otherwise it’s just the farthest star seen by humans.
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