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The name Earendel comes from an Old English word meaning "morning star" or "rising light." When the Hubble Space Telescope looked toward a massive galaxy cluster named WHL0137-08, it wasn't just looking at stars; it was looking back across of time. A Cosmic Trick of Light

: Earendel is estimated to be at least 50 times the mass of our Sun and millions of times as bright.

Under normal circumstances, even our most powerful telescopes couldn't see a single star at such a staggering distance. However, a phenomenon called acted like a natural magnifying glass. The gravity of the foreground galaxy cluster warped and amplified the light of Earendel by thousands of times, stretching it into a long, thin crescent that astronomers nicknamed the "Sunrise Arc." The Significance of 14125