By Leah Crane
A star more than 27 billion light years from Earth is the most distant individual one we have seen. Because light takes time to travel across the universe, this means that we are seeing the star as it existed just 900 million years after the big bang, providing a potentially valuable window into the early universe.
Brian Welch at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland and his colleagues spotted the star with the Hubble Space Telescope using a process called gravitational lensing.