SIGNS IN THE HEAVENS: Astronomers discover most distant star ever seen…
Astronomers have spotted the most distant star ever observed
that is 9 billion light-years from Earth, a new study reported Monday.
“For the first time ever we’re seeing an individual normal star — not a
supernova, not a gamma-ray burst, but a single, stable star — at a
distance of 9 billion light-years,” said Alex Filippenko, an astronomer
at the University of California-Berkeley and co-author of the study.
The star is nicknamed Icarus, after the Greek mythological character who flew too near the sun on wings of feathers and wax that melted. (The formal name is MACS J1149 Lensed Star 1.) . Normally the star would be too faint to view, even with the world’s biggest and most powerful telescopes. But through a quirk of nature that tremendously amplifies the star’s feeble glow, astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope were able to pinpoint this faraway star and set a new distance record. “This star is at least 100 times farther away than the next individual star we can study, READ MORE
The star is nicknamed Icarus, after the Greek mythological character who flew too near the sun on wings of feathers and wax that melted. (The formal name is MACS J1149 Lensed Star 1.) . Normally the star would be too faint to view, even with the world’s biggest and most powerful telescopes. But through a quirk of nature that tremendously amplifies the star’s feeble glow, astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope were able to pinpoint this faraway star and set a new distance record. “This star is at least 100 times farther away than the next individual star we can study, READ MORE