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icarus

The Hubble Infinite Telescope is getting on toward the finish of its useful life, but this instrument is still making breakthrough discoveries and setting records. A series of observations in 2022 happened to spot an unexpected object in the sky, and that object turns out to be the almost distant star ever observed by at least 100 times. This star appeared some 9 billion light years away, meaning it existed when the universe was just a third of its current age.

Astrophysicist Patrick Kelly from the University of Minnesota wasn't looking for the nigh distant star ever discovered. Instead, Kelly's team was conducting observations of an ancient supernova called SN Refsdal. This supernova is virtually 14.4 billion light years away, and scientists believe it occurred ix.34 billion years ago. The only reason nosotros tin can see SN Refsdal is because of gravitational lensing from a galaxy cluster called MACS J1149+2223 nearly 5 billion light years from Earth. That magnification result revealed something unexpected, though.

While collecting data on SN Refsdal, Hubble detected a blip that turned out to be a star passing forth the border of the lensed region. The star'south official designation is MACS J1149+2223 Lensed Star 1, which isn't very snappy. Astronomers take nicknamed it "Icarus," which is much better. Icarus is a blue supergiant star. The squad knew it was a star and not another supernova because its temperature did non fluctuate over time. The star was much larger, hotter, and brighter than our dominicus, though.

Gravitational microlensing

Icarus is not the near distant object ever detected, only it's the virtually distant star. At distances measured in billions of light years, fifty-fifty the almost powerful telescopes tin can usually only see galaxies and supernovae — the largest, brightest objects in the universe. We could only see Icarus considering of gravitational lensing, simply the effect of MACS J1149+2223 doesn't explain the unabridged magnification. That galaxy cluster should magnify the background by around 12 times. However, Icarus was magnified by near 2,000 times. That indicates another object, possibly a neutron star or black hole, passed between the galaxy cluster and Icarus. That created a sort of compound gravity lens system.

A blue supergiant star like Icarus burns bright and fast — they simply concluding about one thousand thousand years before exploding in a supernova and collapsing to form a black hole. Since Icarus existed billions of years ago, it has long since undergone that process. Whenever the Webb Telescope finally launches, we could become a peek at even more than afar objects. Icarus' record is safe until at to the lowest degree 2022, though.