(CNN) Almost 28 years after it was launched, NASA's intrepid Hubble Space Telescope just keeps illuminating distant reaches of the universe.

Thanks to a phenomenon called gravitational lensing , Hubble has helped astronomers set an out-of-this-world record by spotting the farthest individual star ever seen.

The massive blue star, located in a remote spiral galaxy, has the catchy official name of MACS J1149+2223 Lensed Star-1. Luckily for us, scientists have given it a nickname: Icarus, after the character from Greek mythology who flew too close to the sun.

What's most interesting about this discovery is that it is a single star, said lead researcher Patrick Kelly, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.

Icarus is only visible because it is being magnified by the gravity of a massive galaxy cluster. The inset panels at right show the view in 2011, before Icarus was visible, compared with the star's brightening in 2016.

"This is the first time we're seeing a magnified, individual star," Kelly said in a statement. "You can see individual galaxies out there, but this star is at least 100 times farther away than the next individual star we can study, except for supernova explosions."

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