An international team in which Tom Broadhust Ikerbasque researcher at UPV/EHU took part, has identified the furthest individual star ever seen. This enormous blue star has been nicknamed Icarus after the Greek mythological character who flew too near the Sun on wings of feathers and wax that melted.
Normally, this star would be much too faint to view, even with the world’s largest 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.
Scientists were also able to test one theory that dark matter might be made up mostly of a huge number of primordial black holes formed in the birth of the universe. The results of this unique test disfavor that hypothesis, because light fluctuations from the background star, monitored with Hubble for 13 years, would have looked different if there were a swarm of intervening black holes.
Further information: Nature Astronomy volume 2 (2018), pages334–342. doi:10.1038/s41550-018-0430-3
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