NASA's Swift finds an explosion from 13.7 billion years (7% of its current age - and 500 million light years older than previous oldest "burst", indeed only one quasar is known to be farther away than the newly discovered gamma ray burst - and Quasars are luminous objects with black holes containing the mass of billions of stars versus this burst by a single star).
http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-explosion13sep13,0,3715076.story?track=tottextExploding Star Is Said to Be Oldest Ever Observed
A massive energy burst recorded by NASA's Swift satellite signals the first stellar evidence from the very early years of the universe.
By John Johnson Jr.
Times Staff Writer
September 13, 2005
In the equivalent of spotting a bonfire at the dawn of time, NASA's orbiting Swift satellite has detected the most-distant exploding star — a cosmic suicide that took place just 500 million years or so after the creation of the universe, scientists say.
Located 12.6 billion light years from Earth, the explosion shows that giant stars formed earlier than previously thought.
"This is the first direct evidence of very early stars," said Neil Gehrels of the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. "It tells us when the dark ages of the early universe were coming to an end."
In cosmic terms, the "dark ages" were a time when the universe went black a few hundred million years after the Big Bang flooded the universe with light and matter. The dark ages lasted a few hundred million more years until stars began to form, relighting the universe.<snip>
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