Scientists Find Farthest Star Ever Detected

Astronomers have discovered what they say is the most distant star ever observed, a huge blue star dubbed “Icarus” more than 9 billion light-years from Earth, NBC News MACH reported.While the star is about a million times more luminous than the sun, it is so far away that its glow is too faint to be detected by telescopes. The star was visible only because astronomers employed a trick known as “gravitational lensing,” in which gravity from galaxies between Earth and the star acted as a sort of magnifying lens that amplified its light rays.“The discovery of the lensed star was completely serendipitous — we weren’t looking for it,” Dr. Patrick Kelly, a University of Minnesota astrophysicist and the leader of the team of scientists who made the discovery, told NBC News MACH in an email.Photo Credit: NASA, ESA, S. Rodney (John Hopkins University, USA) and the FrontierSN team; T. Treu (University of California Los Angeles, USA), P. Kelly (University of California Berkeley, USA) and the GLASS team;
Source: NBC San Diego