Watch Stephen Colbert Go on an Impressive Lord of the Rings Rant After NASA Names Distant Star Earendel

Though perhaps best known to many for his time on Comedy Central and his current late-night hosting gig, Stephen Colbert’s intense fandom for all things The Lord of the Rings and Tolkein are well documented. In a recent episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, the comedian was doing a segment on recent space news (including, naturally, alien stuff), which included the revelation that the Hubble Telescope has recorded the most distant star ever, one that might be somewhere between 50 and 500 times bigger than our own sun and “millions of times brighter.” The real cherry on top though is the name, which they christened “Earendel.” Colbert naturally had a lot on his mind with this.

“The lead author of the paper describing the star’s discovery has called it ‘Earendel’, which means ‘morning star’ in old English,” Colbert said. “OK, but more importantly it also inspired the name of Tolkien’s great half-elven mariner Eärendil, son of Tuor and Princess Idril, daughter of Turgon, and father of Elros and Elrond, who voyaged to Valinor, entreated the Valar on behalf of the Children of Ilúvatar, and was sentenced to undying doom to carry a Silmaril bound to his forehead as a star and sail across the sky in his great ship Vingilótë until the end of days in the Dagor Dagorath! NASA, return my calls!” Watch the rant for yourself below at around the 3:00 minute mark.

“Earendel existed so long ago that it may not have had all the same raw materials as the stars around us today,” astronomer Brian Welch said when the discovery was announced. “Studying Earendel will be a window into an era of the universe that we are unfamiliar with, but that led to everything we do know. It’s like we’ve been reading a really interesting book, but we started with the second chapter, and now we will have a chance to see how it all got started.”  

As for Colbert and his Tolkein-geekdom, there’s no better proof for his status than from Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit director Peter Jackson hismelf, who once told Digital Spy: “I have never met a bigger Tolkien geek in my life…Philippa Boyens is our resident Tolkien expert, and when Stephen came down to visit the set, we put him head to head with Philippa on a Tolkien quiz—and Stephen triumphed. I have to say, his encyclopedic knowledge of Tolkien is spectacular, and points to a deprived childhood in some respects.”