Edo Berger heard an alarm Thursday morning as a satellite sensed a ten second energy blast called a “gamma ray burst” originating from space. Once the alert was recorded, telescopes the world over pointed towards the blast and soon became aware of infrared radiation. Then Berger got ready to see the light which should have come next. It didn’t come.

Berger said, in a phone interview, “We were kind of blown away. We immediately knew what that meant,”

It means that he found the oldest thing that has been seen so far — a gigantic star blowing up thirteen billion years ago. He calculates that at the time the star exploded, the universe was a mere six hundred million years old.  He went on to explain that in simpler terms.  What he saw on that early morning was a glimpse of about ninety-five percent back into the beginning of all time as we know it.

Berger, who is an astronomy assistant professor at Harvard University, said the when the star, known now as GRB 090423, blew up it emitted a million times more energy than our sun will throughout it’s entire existence.  To the nearest approximation, the star was between thirty to one hundred times bigger than the sun at the time it exploded.

Its gamma radiation was sensed by the NASA satellite, Swift. Hawaii’s Gemini Observatory detected its infrared radiation.