How far is the farthest star we've ever seen? More than halfway across the universe, an enormous blue star nicknamed Icarus was spotted by the Hubble Space Telescope (@NASAHubble) through a quirk of nature that amplified the star's feeble glow. The star, harbored in a very distant spiral galaxy, is so far away that its light has taken 9 billion years to reach Earth. It appears to us as it did when the universe was about 30 percent of its current age. This video shows a galaxy cluster located about 5 billion light-years from Earth. This massive cluster of galaxies sits between the Earth and the galaxy that contains the distant star. Thanks to a lucky alignment between the cluster, a dense object within it and a distant star, the image of the distant star was magnified by a factor of 2000, making it visible by the Hubble Space Telescope. Like the galaxy in which the star is located, the star is actually visible several times. However, the light from the second image of the star was red...