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MACS J1149 Lensed Star 1, also known as Icarus, [note 2] is a blue supergiant star observed through a gravitational lens.It is the seventh most distant individual star to have been detected so far (after Earendel, Godzilla, Mothra, Quyllur, star-1 and star-2), at approximately 14 billion light-years from Earth (redshift z=1.49; comoving distance of 14.4 billion light-years; lookback time of 9. ...
Apr 3, 2018 · While the galaxy cluster was acting as a gravitational lens for Refsdel, this one star passed directly in front of Icarus, intensifying the magnifying effect. Researchers estimate Icarus was ...
Apr 2, 2018 · Much like Icarus, the background star had only fleeting glory as seen from Earth: It momentarily skyrocketed to 2,000 times its true brightness when temporarily magnified. Models suggest that the tremendous brightening was probably from the gravitational amplification of a star, similar in mass to the Sun, in the foreground galaxy cluster when the star moved in front of Icarus.
Apr 2, 2018 · The team initially discovered Icarus while using Hubble to detect and track a known supernova named Refsdal, whose light was predicted to soon be gravitationally lensed by the galaxy cluster MACS ...
- Overview
- How Was It Seen?
- What Does It Mean?
The discovery could help astronomers better understand the evolution of the universe.
A bright blue giant nicknamed Icarus is now the farthest star humans have ever seen.
A group of astronomers had been monitoring a far-off supernova—the explosive death of a giant star—using the Hubble Space Telescope when they saw a new speck of light.
Its glow was given a boost thanks to what's called gravitational lensing. This is when gravity from a massive celestial object acts like a magnifying glass, bending and amplifying the light from objects behind it.
Five billion light-years from Earth, a galaxy cluster sits between our planet and Icarus. According to a model outlined this week in Nature Astronomy, Icarus was magnified when a star in that galaxy cluster moved in front of the more distant star, boosting it to 2,000 times its actual brightness.
“The source isn’t getting hotter; it’s not exploding. The light is just being magnified. And that’s what you expect from gravitational lensing,” study leader Patrick Kelly of the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities says in a press release.
The study notes that Icarus will be a reference point for how astronomers can study the evolution of stars through gravitational lensing.
Scientists generally agree that the birth of the universe as we know it, or the big bang, happened about 13.8 billion years ago. Icarus is so old that the light observed by Hubble was generated when the universe was just 30 percent of its current age.
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Icarus's bright glow is also helping astronomers test hypotheses about dark matter—the elusive material that's thought to make up most of the mass in the universe.
One theory suggests that dark matter is made of primordial black holes, hypothetical objects that would have formed just after the big bang. The light fluctuations seen from Icarus make this hypothesis unlikely, the study authors say, because their observations would not have been possible with intervening black holes.
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Apr 4, 2018 · Dubbed “Icarus,” the newfound star is about a million times more luminous than the ... The image to the left shows a part of the the deep-field observation of the galaxy cluster MACS J1149.5 ...
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Apr 3, 2018 · Space 03 April 2018. By Michelle Starr. (NASA, ESA et al.) Hubble has obtained an absolutely amazing photograph - a blue giant star called Icarus 9 billion light-years from our Solar System, the farthest individual star ever seen. And it's all thanks to a rare alignment of cosmic objects called gravitational lensing.
