In April of this year, theSWIFT satellitedetected the emission of gamma rays from a star that exploded 13 billion years ago, the oldest and most distant star known to date. The robotic telescope of the Spanish astronomical station BOOTES-3 in New Zealand, inaugurated in February of this year, was the first to point to this area of the sky, a minute after receiving the alert of the explosion from the satellite.
The astronomer Alberto Castro Tirado, from the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia (IAA), assures that it is thefarthest object in the Universe detected to date, which also indicateswhere to look for the farthest known galaxy. In reality, this galaxy where the stellar cataclysm has occurred will only be noticeable when Hubble’s successor, the J. Webb Space Telescope, is launched in about 5 years.
The discovery, published today inNature, is carried out within the context of the study of one of the most energetic phenomena in the Universe: thegamma ray bursts. These great bursts of light are the result of the explosion with which a giant star ends its life. Its collapse gives rise to a black hole, or sometimes a neutron star.
According to Alberto Fernández Soto, researcher at the Institute of Physics of Cantabria and a signatory in a second article in the same journal, “it is the oldest object ever observed. The mere fact that we see it confirms that at that time there were already stars, something that until now it was an unconfirmed hypothesis. ” Furthermore, Fernández Soto concludes that “the appearance of objects like this indicates thatthe formation of celestial bodies was faster than previously thought“.
