As both a huge fan of Tolkien and someone fascinated by the exploration of space, today I have no choice but to flag this up*. Scientists working with the Hubble Space Telescope have chosen to name a newly-discovered star after the character Earandel. “A team of researchers led by Brian Welch, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, announced …. that, with observations from Hubble, they have discovered the most distant single star ever before seen. And, while the star’s technical designation is WHL0137-LS, they gave it a much catchier name: Earendel.” Earandel, of course, was a great half-elven mariner from the first age of Middle-Earth who sailed to Valinor, carrying a star “across the sky.”

“In Old English, Earendel is a personal name, but it also can mean ‘the morning star’ or ‘the dawn.’ In the Lord of the Rings, Eärendil is a half-elven character who travels the seas carrying a jewel, a ‘Silmaril,’ called the morning star.“ I find that wonderfully poetic, I must say: a star so distant and ancient now has the name of a wanderer who is himself distant and ancient.

*The story apparently came out in march, but I somehow only came across it today.