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. 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. 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 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. (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. “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. [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. "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. 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.
Astronomers report the discovery of MACS J1149 Lensed Star 1, nicknamed Icarus, the farthest known star at 9 billion light-years away.