We look back in time whenever we look up at the night sky...the light from the stars we see started its journey to use those stars hundreds, millions or even billions of years ago. Recently, NASA succeeded in spotting an explosion that occurred 13.1 billion years ago.
From New Scientest...
Astronomers have spotted the most distant object yet confirmed in the universe – a self-destructing star that exploded 13.1 billion light years from Earth. It detonated just 640 million years after the big bang, around the end of the cosmic "dark ages", when the first stars and galaxies were lighting up space.
The burst's immense distance makes the now-dead star the earliest object to be discovered from an era called 'reionisation', which occurred within the first billion years after the big bang.
"For astronomy, this is a watershed event," Bloom told New Scientist."This is the beginning of the study of the universe as it was before most of the structure that we know about today came into being."
To listen to an NPR segment about the 13.1 billion year old discovery, click here.
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