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Context
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has discovered the farthest individual star ever seen — an enormous blue stellar body nicknamed Icarus located over halfway across the universe
9 billion years
The star, located in a very distant spiral galaxy, is so far away that its light has taken nine billion years to reach Earth. It appears to us as it did when the universe was about 30% of its current age
Gravitational lensing
Through a phenomenon called gravitational lensing (This is when gravity from a massive celestial object acts like a magnifying glass, bending and amplifying the light from objects behind it) that tremendously amplifies the star’s feeble glow, astronomers were able to pinpoint this faraway star and set a new distance record
Significance
- Icarus will be a reference point for how astronomers can study the evolution of stars through gravitational lensing
- Icarus’s bright glow is also helping astronomers test hypotheses about dark matter—the elusive material that’s thought to make up most of the mass in the universe
