NASA | GSFC | STScI | HubbleSite | 2018 Apr 02
More than halfway across the universe, an enormous blue star nicknamed Icarus is the farthest individual star ever seen. Normally, it would be much too faint to view, even with the world’s largest 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. They also used Icarus to test one theory of dark matter, and to probe the make-up of a foreground galaxy cluster.
The star, harbored in a very distant spiral galaxy, is so far away that its light has taken 9 billion years to reach Earth. It appears to us as it did when the universe was about 30 percent of its current age.
The discovery of Icarus through gravitational lensing has initiated a new way for astronomers to study individual stars in distant galaxies. These observations provide a rare, detailed look at how stars evolve, especially the most luminous stars. ...
Hubble Discovers Most Distant Star Ever Observed
ESA Hubble Science Release | 2018 Apr 02
Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have found the most distant star ever discovered. The hot blue star existed only 4.4 billion years after the Big Bang. This discovery provides new insight into the formation and evolution of stars in the early Universe, the constituents of galaxy clusters and also on the nature of dark matter.Click to play embedded YouTube video.
The international team, led by Patrick Kelly (University of Minnesota, USA), Jose Diego (Instituto de Física de Cantabria, Spain) and Steven Rodney (University of South Carolina, USA), discovered the distant star in the galaxy cluster MACS J1149-2223 in April 2016. The observations with Hubble were actually performed in order to detect and follow the latest appearance of the gravitationally lensed supernova explosion nicknamed “Refsdal” (heic1525)[1], when an unexpected point source brightened in the same galaxy that hosted the supernova. ...
The observed light from the newly discovered star, called Lensed Star 1 (LS1) was emitted when the Universe was only about 30 percent of its current age — about 4.4 billion years after the Big Bang. The detection of the star through Hubble was only possible because the light from the star was magnified 2000 times. ...
Hubble peers through cosmic lens to capture most distant star ever seen
University of California, Berkeley | 2018 Apr 02
Two Peculiar Fast Transients in a Strongly Lensed Host Galaxy - S. A. Rodney et al
- Nature Astronomy 2:324 (02 Apr 2018) DOI: 10.1038/s41550-018-0405-4
arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1707.02434 > 08 Jul 2017
- Nature Astronomy 2:334 (02 Apr 2018) DOI: 10.1038/s41550-018-0430-3
arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1706.10279 > 30 Jun 2017
- arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1706.10281 > 30 Jun 2017 (v1), 23 Mar 2018 (v2)