The Hubble Space Telescope has been discovered many things situates billions of light-years away from earth. Now, the telescope has again detected another interesting event. It has managed to capture the light coming from the most distant star ever observed. As per the new finding, the star is situated around 9 billion light-years from Earth. The age of the universe is approximately 13.8 billion years. So, it is now expected the light started traveling around 9 billion years ago.
Stars which are situated far away from earth are quite difficult to detect and it is not also easy to distinguish them individually. But, one can easily detect a galaxy or supernova. But, this star is not a supernova. It is just an ordinary start. When the main sequence star stops burning the hydrogen, it exists from the main sequences. This process develops different outcomes like larger stars explode into supernovas, while smaller stars become a white dwarf, the study inform.
As per the study, the scientists were able to discover the star named Icarus using gravitational lensing method. Its official name is MACS J1149+2223 Lensed Star 1. It is now expected that Icarus will have died making a black hole or a neutron star. Normally, the gravitational lensing process can only magnify things by up to 50 times, but this time the scientists magnified the star more than 2,000 times while passing through a line between Hubble telescope and Icarus. The researchers from the University of California, in the study, stated that the new star can help to know about the evolving process of luminous stars.
Patrick Kelly, from the University of Minnesota and the lead author of the study stated, “You can see individual galaxies out there, but this star is at least 100 times farther away than the next individual star.” Dr. Mathilde Jauzac from Durham University and co-author of the study informed that while the team was monitoring a supernova, named SN Refsdal, which was first detected in 2014, they found Icarus. As per the information, the supernova detected via the gravitational lens made by galaxy cluster called MACS J1149+2223. They found Icarus in images which were taken by the Hubble telescope in between April 2016 and April 2017. Expressing his excitement, Alex Filippenko, an astronomer at UC Berkeley and another co-author of the new study stated that for the first time the team has discovered an individual normal star, which is not a gamma-ray burst or a supernova. It is just a single and stable start at a distance of nine billion light-years.
When the team examined the different color rays approaching form Icarus, they found it was a massive blue star. The star is bigger than the Sun and can emit lights which are thousands of times brighter. The perfect example of this is Rigel, a star situated in the constellation of Orion. The team also detected a second star and that could be either a mirror image of Icarus or that can be another such star.