[PatrickHenry]

From the lead article:
Harvey B. Richer, an astronomer at the University of British Columbia, said the Hubble Space Telescope gathered images of the faintest dying stars it could find in M4, a star cluster some 7,000 light years away.

Is that the farthest cluster in which we can distinguish such stars? On the one hand, it's not all that far (cosmologically speaking); but on the other hand, resolving individual stars in such a cluster seems quite a trick.

[longshadow]

Is that the farthest cluster in which we can distinguish such stars?

Excellent question, grasshopper.....

It is actually the CLOSEST cluster where astronomers hoped to detect such faint beasts, because of the limitations in their equipment precluded from being able to detect objects this faint at greater distances....

..... however, the new equipment JUST installed last month on the Hubble Space Telescope will be many times more sensitive that what they used for this research, and thus will be invaluable in observing more distant clusters to see if the data collected from them supports (or contradicts) this finding.