The Hubble Space Telescope has broken yet another observing record: The famed observatory has found the most distant "ordinary" star ever observed, at an astounding 9 billion light-years from Earth — which means the light scientists see started traveling at least 9 billion years ago. By comparison, the age of the universe is roughly 13.8 billion years.

Normally, stars that far away are too difficult to make out individually; a galaxy or a supernova (star explosion) is much easier to see. But this particular star — classified as an ordinary star, meaning a star on the main sequence of evolution that is fusing hydrogen into helium — came to light thanks to a rare alignment, researchers reported in a new study. When a main sequence star ceases burning the hydrogen at its core, it leaves the main sequence. This leads to a range of different outcomes for stars. Commonly, larger stars off the main sequence explode into supernovas, while smaller stars collapse into white dwarfs.

Astronomers found the star, which is nicknamed Icarus, through gravitational lensing. This phenomenon refers to how a massive galaxy cluster or other object can bend light from objects behind it, making dim objects much brighter from Earth's perspective. [In Photos: Cosmic Lenses Reveal Expansion of the Universe]

Usually, this lensing process can magnify objects by up to 50 times, but astronomers got lucky here: The newfound star was magnified more than 2,000 times because a star was briefly passing through the line of sight between Hubble and Icarus, researchers said in a statement from the University of California, Berkeley. This rare glimpse of a faraway star could provide a window into how stars in general evolve, especially those that are extremely luminous, the team said.

The most distant "normal" star ever found, nicknamed Icarus, was spotted 9 billion light-years from Earth because of a chance alignment with a foreground object. (Image credit: P. Kelly (University of California, Berkeley)/NASA/ESA)

"You can see individual galaxies out there, but this star is at least 100 times farther away than the next individual star we can study, except for supernova explosions," lead study author Patrick Kelly said in the statement. Kelly was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Berkeley when he worked on the research but is currently on the faculty at the University of Minnesota.

Icarus, known more formally as MACS J1149 Lensed Star 1 (LS1), showed up as Kelly was following up on a supernova, called SN Refsdal, that he discovered in 2014. The supernova was discovered using a gravitational lens in the constellation Leo; the lens was formed by a galaxy cluster known as MACS J1149+2223.

"For the first time ever, we're seeing an individual normal star — not a supernova, not a gamma-ray burst, but a single stable star — at a distance of nine billion light-years," study co-author Alex Filippenko, an astronomer at UC Berkeley, said in the same statement. These lenses are amazing cosmic telescopes."

Kelly's team examined the colors coming from Icarus' light and found that it was a blue supergiant. This kind of star is more massive and larger than our sun, shining up to hundreds of thousands of times brighter. Still, Icarus was so far away that astronomers never would have spotted it without powerful lensing. Kelly suspected the star was far more magnified than the supernova — a hypothesis later borne out by modeling.

"By modeling the lens, they [astronomers] concluded that the tremendous apparent brightening of Icarus was probably caused by a unique effect of gravitational lensing," UC Berkeley representatives said in the statement. "While an extended lens, like a galaxy cluster, can only magnify a background object up to 50 times, smaller objects can magnify much more.

"A single star in a foreground lens, if precisely aligned with a background star, can magnify the background star thousands of times," they added. "In this case, a star about the size of our sun briefly passed directly through the line of sight between the distant star Icarus and Hubble, boosting its brightness more than 2,000 times."

The star Icarus appeared magnified by a factor of 2,000 because of an effect known as gravitational microlensing. (Image credit: NASA, ESA, S. Rodney (John Hopkins University) and the FrontierSN team; T. Treu (University of California, Los Angeles), P. Kelly (University of California, Berkeley) and the GLASS team; J. Lotz (STScI) and the Frontier Fields team; M. Postman (STScI) and)

Fortunately for astronomers, Icarus is well placed for more of these alignments. As stars in the cluster MACS J1149+2223 move around, the brightness of Icarus could be increased as much as 10,000 times during other lensing events. Astronomers might be able to catch more of these rare events in general if they look in the right location, the team added.

"There are alignments like this all over the place as background stars or stars in lensing galaxies move around, offering the possibility of studying very distant stars dating from the early universe, just as we have been using gravitational lensing to study distant galaxies," Filippenko said in the statement. "For this type of research, nature has provided us with a larger telescope than we can possibly build."

Icarus showed up in Hubble images taken between April 2016 and April 2017. A second star appeared in some observations that could be either a mirror image of Icarus or yet another star being gravitationally lensed.

Astronomers also probed dark matter — a little-understood substance that makes up most of the universe — with observations of Icarus. In contrast to what some previous theories had stated, the new observations suggest that dark matter is not made up of primordial black holes within galaxy clusters.

The new work was detailed today (April 2) in the journal Nature Astronomy.

Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.</s>Astronomers have spotted the most distant star ever observed that is 9 billion light-years from Earth, a new study reported Monday.

“For the first time ever we’re seeing an individual normal star — not a supernova, not a gamma-ray burst, but a single, stable star — at a distance of 9 billion light-years,” said Alex Filippenko, an astronomer at the University of California-Berkeley and co-author of the study.

The star is nicknamed Icarus, after the Greek mythological character who flew too near the sun on wings of feathers and wax that melted. (The formal name is MACS J1149 Lensed Star 1.)

Normally the star would be too faint to view, even with the world’s biggest and most powerful telescopes. But through a quirk of nature that tremendously amplifies the star’s feeble glow, astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope were able to pinpoint this faraway star and set a new distance record.

"This star is at least 100 times farther away than the next individual star we can study, except for supernova explosions,” said the study's lead author, Patrick Kelly of the University of Minnesota.

The method that allowed the star to be spotted is called gravitational lensing, which is the bending of light by massive galaxy clusters in the line of sight. The phenomenon can magnify the distant universe and make visible certain objects that are dim and far away.

The detection of the star through the Hubble telescope was possible only because the light from the star was magnified 2,000 times.

The observed light from the newly discovered star was emitted when the universe was only about 30% of its current age — about 4.4 billion years after the Big Bang.

Astronomers say the imminent arrival of new, more powerful telescopes like the James Webb Space Telescope will make it possible to study the evolution of the earliest stars in greater detail than ever expected.</s>Astronomers have identified a star 9 billion light years from Earth – the farthest individual star ever seen.

Astronomers have identified a star 9 billion light years from Earth – the farthest individual star ever seen.

This achievement was made possible due to a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing. Previously used to locate planets far outside the Milky Way, lensing involves galaxies within astronomers’ line of sight bending rays of light and effectively magnifying objects in distant parts of the universe.

The team had been using the Hubble Space Telescope to monitor a supernova when they noticed a point of light, which they later realised was an individual star. In this case, the gravity of a massive galaxy cluster 5 billion light years away created the lensing effect, allowing astronomers to see the object – a blue supergiant they named Icarus.

“For the first time ever we’re seeing an individual normal star – not a supernova, not a gamma ray burst, but a single stable star – at a distance of 9 billion light years,” said Professor Alex Filippenko, an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley, and a co-author of the paper documenting this discovery.

While it is possible to view galaxies very far away – as they glow with the light of billions of stars – and supernovas due to their incredible brightness, the discovery of an isolated star at this distance is unique. “You can see individual galaxies out there, but this star is at least 100 times farther away than the next individual star we can study,” said Dr Patrick Kelly, an astronomer at the University of Minnesota who led the study.

The reason for this discrepancy is that on top of the initial magnification by the galaxy cluster, this star was further magnified when another individual star within that cluster happened to precisely align in front of Icarus. This foreground star added to the overall magnification effect, boosting its brightness more than 2,000 times.

Dr Kelly and the team predict that in the coming decades Icarus will be magnified many more times, potentially as much as 10,000 times its actual brightness. They said by using gravitational lensing it could be possible to view many more distant objects, and in doing so learn about stars in galaxies formed during the first days of the universe.

“There are alignments like this all over the place as background stars or stars in lensing galaxies move around, offering the possibility of studying very distant stars dating from the early universe, just as we have been using gravitational lensing to study distant galaxies,” said Professor Filippenko. “For this type of research, nature has provided us with a larger telescope than we can possibly build.”</s>Usually at such distances scientists can only image galaxies, collections of billions of stars such as our own Milky Way, or supernovas and gamma ray bursts, colossal cosmic explosions. Beyond about 100 million light years it is impossible to make out individual stars even with the most powerful telescopes. In this case, a rare cosmic alignment naturally magnified the supergiant more than 2,000 times, allowing astronomers to see it. The B-type blue supergiant star, hundreds or even thousands of times brighter than the sun, was discovered in Hubble Space Telescope images taken over the course of a year between April 2016 and 2017.

It could only be seen because of an effect called "gravitational lensing" that occurs when massive galaxy clusters bend the light of objects behind them. In effect the galaxies act as a magnifying glass that can render dim far away objects visible. The lensing phenomenon, predicted by Albert Einstein, is the result of a massive object bending space-time around it and forcing light beams to take a curved path. Lead scientist Dr Patrick Kelly, who worked on the observations while at the University of California at Berkeley, US, said: "You can see individual galaxies out there, but this star is at least 100 times farther away than the next individual star we can study, except for supernova explosions."

The star has the long formal name MACS J1149 Lensed Star 1 (LS1), but has been dubbed "Icarus" by the astronomers. A report on its discovery appears in the journal Nature Astronomy. Co-author Professor Alex Filippenko, also from the University of California at Berkeley, said: "For the first time ever we're seeing an individual normal star, not a supernova, not a gamma ray burst, but a single stable star, at a distance of nine billion light years.

He added that other gravitational lensing alignments should allow more distant stars to be studied. "There are alignments like this all over the place as background stars or stars in lensing galaxies move around, offering the possibility of studying very distant stars dating from the early universe, just as we have been using gravitational lensing to study distant galaxies," said Prof Filippenko. "For this type of research, nature has provided us with a larger telescope than we can possibly build."</s>There are stars too faint to see in the night sky just a few light years away, yet a chance cosmic event gave us a glimpse of a star that would have otherwise been completely invisible due to its immense distance from Earth—a whopping 9 billion light-years away.

A paper today in Nature Astronomy reports the discovery of the star, called MACS J1149 Lensed Star 1, or Icarus informally. Finding such a distant star is normally a tall order, but a larger object happened to pass in front of its home galaxy. When a large object passes in front of another, its gravitational well bends space around it and can act like a giant magnifying glass in the sky.

Astronomers know when they're seeing a gravitationally lensed object because of an effect called Einstein's Ring. This is a halo of light bent around the lensed object. The astronomers were already observing the lensing event with the Hubble Space Telescope to study to the supernova Refsdal, which was spotted in 2016.

Icarus is a B-type star, often called a blue giant due to the color it radiates. They're the second most massive type of main sequence star. The star's discovery is the first time a lensing event has revealed a star so distant that wasn't part of a violent stellar event.

“For the first time ever we’re seeing an individual normal star—not a supernova, not a gamma-ray burst, but a single stable star—at a distance of nine billion light-years,” Alex Filippenko, a professor of astronomy at UC Berkeley, said in a press release. 



Astronomers also witnessed what was either a mirror image of Icarus or an unrelated star in the lensing event. The event may also repeat itself, giving astronomers the opportunity to view Icarus a few more times in the coming years.</s>Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have found the farthest star ever observed, a bright dot 9 billion light-years away. Forget thanking their lucky stars: This discovery required the fortuitous alignment of a massive galactic cluster. The cluster warped the starlight, bending it toward Earth while magnifying the star 2,000 times.

Officially, the star's name is MACS J1149+2223 Lensed Star 1. But the astronomers call it Icarus. Icarus was a hundredfold more distant than any other lone star previously detected, according to Patrick Kelly, an astrophysicist at the University of Minnesota. Normally only phenomena like supernovas — catastrophic stellar explosions — or entire galaxies are detectable at such vast distances.

Kelly had not set out to spy on record-breaking stars. No other individual star had been seen in such a distance. The astrophysicist and his colleagues were studying Hubble images of a supernova called SN Refsdal. But in 2016, they found a blip that appeared in the same galaxy that housed the supernova. This blip, as Kelly and his co-authors wrote in a report published recently in the journal Nature Astronomy, was not another supernova but a blue supergiant star.

About halfway between Icarus's spiral galaxy and our own was a third object, a massive cluster of galaxies that acted as the lens of the magnifying glass. It just so happened that Icarus passed "along the critical curve" of the cluster, Kelly said, which warped the starlight in our direction — a process called gravitational lensing. The effect was like "a natural telescope, much more powerful than anything we could build."

The authors of the new study identified Icarus as a stable star and not an explosion because its temperature did not appear to fluctuate. Supernovas "start out very hot and cool down. We saw no evidence of a change in temperature," Kelly said. Still, Icarus was massive, hotter than the Sun, and possibly thousands of times as luminous.

It also no longer exists, Kelly said. Blue supergiant stars do not have life spans of nine billion years. He suspected Icarus either collapsed into a black hole or wound up as a neutron star.

Icarus burned bright and early. The universe is 13.8 billion years old; to view Icarus's starlight is to look back through three-quarters of the universe's age. If astrophysicists look sufficiently deep enough, Kelly said, they should be able to learn about some of the universe's first stars. Kelly said this technique, coupling nature's magnifying glass with future machines like the James Webb Telescope, could yield additional discoveries — stars older and more distant, even, than Icarus.</s>Washington, April 2 (IANS) American astronomers have captured the most distant normal star ever observed, some 9 billion light years from Earth, thanks to a rare cosmic alignment.

The study, published on Monday online in the journal Nature Astronomy, revealed the discovery of a star called Icarus, magnified by gravitational lensing by over 2,000 times, reported Xinhua.

Astronomers routinely study galaxies much farther away, visible because they glow with the brightness of billions of stars. They also managed to study supernova, often brighter than the galaxy in which it sits.

However, for a distance of about 100 million light years, the stars in these galaxies are impossible to make out individually.

But a phenomenon called gravitational lensing, the bending of light by massive galaxy clusters in the line of sight, can magnify the distant universe and make dim, far away objects visible.

The single star was discovered in NASA Hubble Space Telescope images taken in late April of 2016 and as recently as April 2017.

“You can see individual galaxies out there, but this star is at least 100 times farther away than the next individual star we can study, except for supernova explosions,” said Patrick Kelly at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, the paper’s first author.

These observations can provide a rare look at how stars evolve, especially the most luminous ones.

“For the first time ever we’re seeing an individual normal star – not a supernova, not a gamma ray burst, but a single stable star – at a distance of nine billion light years,” said Alex Filippenko, a professor of astronomy at UC Berkeley and one of many co-authors of the report.

The B-type star Icarus is much larger, more massive, hotter and possibly hundreds of thousands of times intrinsically brighter than our Sun.

According to the researchers, an extended lens, like a galaxy cluster, can only magnify a background object up to 50 times, but smaller objects can magnify much more.

A single star in a foreground lens, if precisely aligned with a background star, can magnify the background star thousands of times.

In this case, a star about the size of our sun briefly passed directly through the line of sight between the distant star Icarus and Hubble, boosting its brightness significantly.

Also, if the alignment was perfect, that single star within the cluster turned the light from the distant star into an “Einstein ring”: a halo of light created when light from the distant star bends around all sides of the lensing star.

The ring is too small to discern from this distance, but the effect made the star easily visible by magnifying its apparent brightness.

The astronomers predict that Icarus will be magnified many times over the next decade as cluster stars move around, perhaps increasing its brightness as much as 10,000 times.</s>In a study published in Monday’s issue of the journal Nature Astronomy, an international team of researches announced the discovery of a star a mind-boggling nine billion light years from Earth, the farthest individual star ever seen by man, using the Hubble Space Telescope and a phenomenon called gravitational lensing.

Normally the star would be too faint to view, but a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing, a quirk of nature that enormously amplifies a star’s feeble glow helped the astronomers working at the University of California to pinpoint the faraway luminary.

Stars more than 100 million light years away are usually impossible to make out, but detecting the blue supergiant, which has since been nicknamed Icarus, was made possible only because its light was magnified 2,000 times, Space.com wrote.

Gravitational lensing can magnify distant objects only about 50 times, but, much to the researchers’ surprise and satisfaction, Icarus was magnified to a far greater degree.

This happened because on top of the initial magnification by the galaxy cluster, Icarus was further magnified when another star aligned precisely in front of it.

The rare glimpse of a faraway star could provide a window into how stars in general evolve, especially those that are extremely luminous.

With the upcoming launch of modern, more-powerful telescopes like the James Webb Telescope, astronomers believe that microlensing events like this may allow them to study the evolution of the universe's earliest stars in unprecedented detail.</s>Spotting objects in space has gotten easier and easier thanks to technological advances, but sometimes mother nature gives astronomers a bit of help as well. Scientists using the trust Hubble Space Telescope have announced the discovery of the most distant star ever observed, and it’s really, really far out there. The star, named MACS J1149 LS1 (LS1 for short), is so far away that the light researchers see from it today was produced just 4.4 billion years after the Big Bang.

Remarkably, the scientist who spotted the star weren’t even really looking for it at all. The team was originally studying a supernova explosion in a galaxy cluster known as MACS J1149.5-223 when they realized a tiny blue dot in their view was actually a star in the distant background. Now the unexpected discovery is being used to demonstrate how the phenomenon of gravitational lensing can be used to detect objects we’d never be able to see on our own.

Gravitational lensing occurs when the light of a far-off object, like a star, is bent and stretched by the gravity of a different body lying between the observer and the object itself. As the light bends due to gravity it is magnified, allowing it to be observed from a much larger distance. LS1, which stands for Lensed Star 1, is the first individual star to be spotted in this manner, and its light has been magnified over 2,000 times by the gravitational lens.

“You can see individual galaxies out there, but this star is at least 100 times farther away than the next individual star we can study, except for supernova explosions,” Patrick Kelly of the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, explains. Kelly is one of the authors of a new paper in Nature Astronomy describing the discovery.

The star is so far away that it is thought to be around 100 times more distant than the next farthest star ever observed. That figures out to around nine billion light years, which is so far that there’s no way we’d ever have been able to see it without the gravity assist. Very little is known about the star itself, aside from the fact that it exists, but at this point the discovery itself is still a remarkable achievement.</s>NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has set a new record on the most distant ordinary star ever observed. The star was 9 billion light years from Earth.

The age of the universe has been estimated to be about 13.8 billion years.

The star's observation was made possible by a rare alignment of galaxies that greatly amplified the light coming off it.

Named Icarus, it is a blue star about halfway across the entire universe. The star's light took about 9 billion years to get here and that light was generated when reality was about 30 percent of its current age, explained NASA.

Light from Icarus reached Hubble through what NASA called "gravitational lensing" and this could be used in future to study stars from distant galaxies. Gravity from a galaxy cluster in between the source of light (in this case, Icarus) and the observer (Hubble) has the tendency to bend light, and magnify it as it passes through space and time. This, at times, can lead to light from the same source scattering, showing two stars in place of one.

Sometimes, if we are lucky, light gets magnified, making it bright enough to be seen from Earth.

"This is the first time we're seeing a magnified, individual star," explained study lead Patrick Kelly. "You can see individual galaxies out there, but this star is at least 100 times farther away than the next individual star we can study, except for supernova explosions."

Gravity from a galaxy cluster called MACS J1149+2223 is what is allowing astronomers to see Icarus. Sighting of the star first happened in 2016, noted NASA, when Hubble was looking at a magnified supernova. They saw a blue light in the same field and, given the position of the light, realized it must have received a lot more magnification from the gravitational lens.

"The source isn't getting hotter; it's not exploding. The light is just being magnified," said Kelly. "And that's what you expect from gravitational lensing." That is also how the team knew what they were looking at was not a supernova but an individual star.

Icarus was a supergiant blue star. That means it was a hotter, larger, heavier, more massive, and possibly hundreds of thousands of times intrinsically brighter than the Sun. Even so, the light coming off it needed to be magnified for it to reach Earth, noted NASA.

Sighting of Icarus has also given NASA the unique opportunity to study Dark Matter — the invisible particles that make up a majority of the universe but is somehow not visible to humans.

Icarus might not exist right now, having gone supernova in the time the light from it took to reach Earth.
Astronomers report the discovery of MACS J1149 Lensed Star 1, nicknamed Icarus, the farthest known star at 9 billion light-years away.