In the Wednesday edition of the journal Nature, two different articles illustrate the astronomers' detection of the thus-far most distant cosmic event - a '13-billion-year back' explosion from a star that took place after the universe came into being!

According to the findings of two separate teams of astronomers, the dying star's high-energy gamma-ray burst, dubbed GRB 090423, have been traced back to 630 million years after the supposed creation of the universe by the so-called 'Big Bang' almost 14 billion years ago.

The team headed by Nial Tanvir of Britain's University of Leicester reported that the star's 8.2 'redshift' - that is, the distortion of light as it travels across space and time - marks the highest-ever redshift measured by scientists; and indicates that the burst took place when the universe was not even 5 percent of its present age.

In a commentary accompanying the article, Bing Zhang of the University of Nevada specified: "The redshift measured for GRB 090423 means that the burst occurred at a time when the universe was about nine times smaller than it is today -- putting the timing of the event at about 630 million years after the Big Bang."

Prior to this recent discovery, the earliest stellar explosion to have been recorded happened 200 million years afterwards, and involved a star that was in much closer proximity to the Earth.