Scientists have captured a picture of the most far-off specific Star ever identified one that is nine billion light years away or 100 times farther away than the previous record-breaker.

The star is a blue Supergiant Nicknamed Icarus, potentially hundreds of countless times brighter than the sun. The light in the image left the star when deep space was simply 5 billion years of ages. The universe’s present age is estimated at 13.8 billion years.

The record-breaking picture was recorded by the Hubble area telescope. Effective as Hubble is, it normally wouldn’t have actually had the ability to see even a star this bright up until now away.

Hubble itself was fortunate adequate to view the star through a short-term “natural telescope” a phenomenon called gravitational lensing, reported a worldwide group of astronomers in the journal Nature Astronomy today.

Gravity from massive galaxy clusters can in some cases function as a lens in area, flexing and magnifying the light of things behind them.

In this case, researchers believe an enormous star from a galaxy cluster called MACS J1149 +2223, about five billion light years from Earth, momentarily passed in front of Icarus, amplifying it and enhancing making it appear 2,000 times brighter than regular.

At that moment in 2016, Patrick Kelly, then a postdoctoral scientist at the University of California Berkeley, had actually been utilizing Hubble to keep an eye on a supernova in the exact same field of vision as Icarus.

He and his team discovered a star that had not shown up in the past. More research study revealed it wasn’t a supernova, as it wasn’t getting hotter or taking off.

” The light is just being amplified,” Kelly stated in a statement. “And that’s exactly what you get out of gravitational lensing.”

Kelly is now an assistant teacher of physics and astronomy at the University of Minnesota.

While gravitational lensing has been used to identify very distant galaxies, which shine with the light of billions of stars, this is the first time it has actually been observed magnifying an individual star, the scientists report.

Astronomers have actually seen galaxies as far away as 13.3 billion light years.