The light from this star that astronomers just spotted is 12.9 billion years old

The Hubble Space Telescope has spotted the farthest star ever seen. (NASA, ESA, Brian Welch [JHU], Dan Coe [STScI])

Astronomers have used the Hubble Space Telescope to capture light from what appears to be the most distant single star ever seen.

Because light takes time to travel through space, scientists see this star as it appeared when its light began its journey 12.9 billion years ago — just 900 million years after the Big Bang that started the universe.

The find, described in the journal Nature, is unusual because most of the light that scientists have spotted from the early days of the universe has come from galaxies that contain many stars and look like little blobs.