They've nicknamed it "Earendel" and it's the most distant, single star yet imaged by a telescope.
The light from this object has taken 12.9 billion years to reach us.
It's at the sort of distance that telescopes normally would only be able to resolve galaxies containing millions of stars.
But the Hubble space observatory has picked out Earendel individually by exploiting a natural phenomenon that's akin to using a zoom lens.
It's called gravitational lensing and it works like this: If there is a great cluster of galaxies in the line of sight, the gravitational pull from this mass of matter will bend and magnify the light of more distant objects behind.
Usually, this is just other galaxies, but in this specific case Earendel was in a sweetspot in the lens effect.
"We got lucky. This is really extreme; it's really exciting to find something with such a high magnification," said Brian Welch, a PhD student from Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, US. "If you happen to hit that right sweetspot, like we have in this case, the magnification can grow up to factors of 1000s," he told BBC News.
The previous record-setter was a star called Icarus. Again, captured by Hubble, the light from this star took nine billion years to reach us.
The light from this object has taken 12.9 billion years to reach us.
It's at the sort of distance that telescopes normally would only be able to resolve galaxies containing millions of stars.
But the Hubble space observatory has picked out Earendel individually by exploiting a natural phenomenon that's akin to using a zoom lens.
It's called gravitational lensing and it works like this: If there is a great cluster of galaxies in the line of sight, the gravitational pull from this mass of matter will bend and magnify the light of more distant objects behind.
Usually, this is just other galaxies, but in this specific case Earendel was in a sweetspot in the lens effect.
"We got lucky. This is really extreme; it's really exciting to find something with such a high magnification," said Brian Welch, a PhD student from Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, US. "If you happen to hit that right sweetspot, like we have in this case, the magnification can grow up to factors of 1000s," he told BBC News.
The previous record-setter was a star called Icarus. Again, captured by Hubble, the light from this star took nine billion years to reach us.