Free Astronomy Magazine May-June 2018

50 MAY-JUNE 2018 SPACE CHRONICLES had amplified its brightness such that it could be detected with the Hubble Space Telescope. The discov- ery has also helped to test a new theory of dark matter and to study what clusters of galaxies are made of. The results of this study were published in the journal Nature As- tronomy . Icarus is located in a spiral galaxy that is so far from Earth that its light has taken 9000 million years to reach us. According to Patrick Kelly, a researcher from the University of Minnesota and leader of the team, “This is the first time we’ve seen an individual star so far away. We can see very distant galaxies, but this star is a hundred times more distant than the next farthest star that we can observe, unless we include su- pernova explosions as stars.” The cosmic quirk that has allowed us to see this star is a phenomenon Hubble discovers the most distant star ever observed by IAC I f we could travel halfway across the Universe, we would find a huge star, christened Icarus, that was found after its discovery to be the most distant star from Earth. Normally, it would be impossible to detect it, even using the most pow- erful telescopes currently available, were it not for a quirk of nature that I carus, whose official name is "MACS J1149+2223 Lensed Star 1", is the farthest single star ever seen. It is only visible due to the amplification of its brightness produced by a massive cluster of galaxies, located about 5,000 million light years from Earth. [Gabriel Pérez, SMM (IAC)]