Icarus
Blue supergiant · MACS J1149 Lensed Star 1
First star seen across billions of light-years
The first single star ever spotted across billions of light-years, revealed in 2018 when a quirk of gravitational lensing magnified it more than two thousandfold. A blue supergiant whose light has travelled some nine billion years to reach us.
Illustration from its stellar type, not a photograph
33.0 ☉
mass (the Sun = 1)
9.3 billion ly
from Earth
z = 1.49
redshift
Its light has been travelling 9.3 billion years to reach us, so you see Icarus as it was 9.3 billion years ago, early in the history of the universe.
Source · Kelly et al. 2018, Nature Astronomy 2, 334 · View on Wikidata
It lives in
a spiral galaxy 9 billion light-years away, gravitationally lensed
Too distant to catalog as a galaxy of its own; visible only because a closer mass bends its light toward us.