Exploding Star for the Ages

Back in April, astronomers saw an exploding star. Usually, this is an event of only passing interest to the general public, but this exploding star was a bit different: it's the oldest object ever seen by human eyes, as reported Wednesday in the journal Nature.

How old is old? The star, dubbed GRB 090423 (the GRB stands for Gamma-Ray Burst) exploded about 13 billion years ago — long before the Earth, or even the Milky Way Galaxy, were formed. Or, to put it another way, the star died about 630 million years after the Big Bang.

The incredible age of this exploding star sheds new light on the early development of the universe. It's a find of almost theological dimensions. Even astronomers are using words that have a poetic ring.

For example, Dr. Dale Frail, from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Socorro, NM, is quoted in The Telegraph as saying: ''This explosion provides an unprecedented look at an era when the universe was very young and also was undergoing drastic changes. The primal cosmic darkness was being pierced by the light of the first stars and the first galaxies were beginning to form. The star that exploded in this event was a member of one of these earliest generations of stars."

Photo courtesy of NASA/Swift/Stefan Immler