Blast from Giant Star Spotted

An explosion set off the destruction of a star has set a record as the most distant object ever seen—a mind-boggling 13 billion light years away. A Cambridge University professor could not hide his excitement at the discovery, spotted by a NASA satellite, telling the BBC, “[This] was probably one of the first stars that ever formed in the universe.” Experts study such great distances to help them better understand the beginning of the universe and the forces behind its development. The BBC reports that the explosion, which likely formed a black hole, occurred when the universe was “only 630 million years old, a mere one-20th of its current age”—estimated at 13.7 billion years old.