Research Team Led By U Of M Professor Discovers Farthest Individual Star Ever Seen

MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) -- A professor at the University of Minnesota discovered something out of this world: An enormous blue star that's the farthest individual star ever seen.

Using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers of the U of M research team were able to pinpoint the star and set a new distance record.

Nicknamed Icarus, the star is 36 trillion miles away from earth, which means the light takes 9 billion years to reach us.

Professor Patrick Kelly led the international research team.

"It opens a window into the universe when it was much younger than it is today, so this is a way to actually start to study at an unprecedented resolution how stars lived and died back then," Kelly said.

Kelly says NASA is working on a telescope that will be 10 times more powerful than Hubble. They hope to use it to find more stars further out in the universe.

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