Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have spied what they suspect is a single star in a galaxy far, far away—the farthest and most primordial star yet observed.

“It’s by far the most distant individual star that we’ve ever seen,” says NASA’s Jane Rigby, a co-author of the paper describing the discovery published today in the journal Nature. “This will be our best chance to study what an individual, massive star was like in the early universe.”

The star is nicknamed Earendel, after the Old English for “morning star” or “rising light.” It hails from just 900 million years after the big bang; the previous record holder, nicknamed Icarus, existed roughly 4.3 billion years after