A rare gravitational lensing event has allowed astronomers to image the most distant single star ever observed
A giant, heavy object bends light from objects behind it due to its strong gravity - an effect called gravitational lensing.
In a study published today in Nature Astronomy, an worldwide team of researchers announced the discovery of the most distant star ever observed. In order to do so, according to a new paper published today in Nature Astronomy, they combined the power of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope with a natural effect that makes distant objects appear much brighter than usual: gravitational lensing.
"We are looking back three-quarters of the way nearly to the big bang", said Dr Patrick Kelly, first author of the research from the University of Minnesota.
Its official name is "MACS J1149+2223 Lensed Star 1", after the cluster of galaxies - some five billion light-years from Earth - whose gravity warped the space around the cluster, causing the light from Icarus (located behind the cluster) to be distorted and magnified some 2,000 times.
There are stars excessively black out, making it impossible to find in the night sky only a couple of light years away, yet a shot vast occasion gave us a look at a star that would have generally been totally imperceptible because of its very big separation from Earth-an incredible 9 billion light-years away.
An global team of researchers, lead by Patrick Kelly, and including University of Tokyo School of Science Assistant Professor and Kavli IPMU Associate Scientist Masamune Oguri, were able to discover this star, which they have named Icarus, because its brightness had been magnified by 2000 times by the gravity of a larger object in front of it.
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Icarus showed up in Hubble images taken between April 2016 and April 2017. The star in this case is so far away that scientists didn't actually see the Einstein ring as a ring.
While originally observing galaxy cluster MACS J1149+2223, 5 billion light years away, using the Hubble Space Telescope, the researchers noticed a flickering light in the background.
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Kelly saw a second star in the Hubble image, which could either be a mirror image of Icarus, or a different star being gravitationally lensed.
"I never imagined that we would be able to observe individual stars at such great distances".
Other research teams have used gravitational lensing for other discoveries as well. Astronomers can study objects through such a cosmic magnifying glass that would otherwise be invisible. Gravitational lensing relies on good luck, but it makes stars much easier to spot, easily magnifying them about 50 times over.
This type B star is much larger, more massive, hotter, and possibly hundreds of thousands of times intrinsically brighter than the Sun.
"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 nine billion light-years", study co-author Alex Filippenko, an astronomer at UC Berkeley, said in the same statement.
Detecting the amplification of a single, pinpoint background star provided a unique opportunity to test the nature of dark matter in the cluster.
"These chance alignments are quite rare and tend to be hard to identify", said Messias, of the Universidad de Concepción in Chile and the Universidade de Lisboa in Portugal.
When NASA's James Webb Space Telescope is launched, astronomers expect to find many more stars like Icarus.
The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of global cooperation between NASA and ESA (European Space Agency).
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