You might be familiar with the Incubus line, “the sky resembles a backlit canopy with holes punched in it”.

Well, a photograph taken by the Hubble space telescope, that pretty much resembles that description, has assisted scientists in discovering what one of those “holes” really is.

The image, which features millions of stars, also includes “the most distant individual star ever seen that is not a supernova,” reports The Guardian.

Take a deep breath, because you’re going to need to focus:

The team behind the find say the light was emitted from the star – dubbed Icarus but officially named MACS J1149+2223 Lensed Star 1 – when it was more than 9bn light years from Earth. Icarus is now much further away but will have died, forming either a black hole or a neutron star.

“We are looking back three-quarters of the way almost to the big bang,” said Dr Patrick Kelly, first author of the research from the University of Minnesota.

Stars at such distance are normally too faint to be identified individually, unless they explode in a supernova. But it seems a chance alignment of the heavens made Icarus visible.

“It’s more than 100 times farther away than the next most distant individual star we can observe,” said Kelly.

Insane, right? The international team of researchers’ paper was published in the journal Nature Astronomy, where they explained how their interest in the star was piqued in 2016:

The team was studying a supernova known as SN Refsdal in a galaxy more than 9bn light years away when they noticed a pinprick of light that appeared four times brighter than in previous images. This seemed to come from an object in the same galaxy as the supernova, and appeared in the environs of a well-known galaxy cluster that lay just over 5bn light years from Earth.

“As we monitored the cluster due to SN Refsdal, we obtained imaging of the cluster regularly, and we saw the ‘Icarus region’ brightening up,” said Dr Mathilde Jauzac, another author of the study from Durham University.

Take a look for yourself:

Make sense, huh?

The team determined that the speck’s brightness was magnified thanks to a phenomenon known as “gravitational lensing”, whereby “light emitted by the star is bent by the gravitational effect of objects in front of it – in this case the galaxy cluster”:

The increase in brightness of Icarus, the researchers say, is due to an additional magnification boost from a star within the galaxy cluster.

“Usually the stars [are magnified] by about 600 [times]; that is just due to the cluster itself. But sometimes a star kind of floating in the middle of a cluster will also get in the right place and that will contribute additional magnification,” said Kelly. “That is what was responsible for the brightening of [Icarus] by a factor of four.”

So, thanks to the galaxy cluster, Icarus was magnified more than 2 000 times, and the curious researchers were able to spot it.

Upon analysis, the team figured out that it’s a “blue supergiant, a rare type of star that is larger than the Sun and far more luminous”.

Yes, exactly like the star known as Rigel in the constellation of Orion.

[source:theguardian]