old stars

Rhonda and I, before she fell asleep, talked about far away things. She asked if I had seen the news about the oldest star. I shared I had glanced at the headlines but not looked in detail. She said it had been nicknamed Icarus. I said I wasn't surprised by these types of discoveries. Our processing of data from space telescopes continued to improve so we were reaching further back all the time. Things that distant were often measured by their redshift values. I told rho how Ian W and I had enjoyed viewing quasars with very high redshifts and light-times on the order of 10 billion years. About 2/3rds of the age of the Universe. Before our solar system had formed. Didn't that make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up? I reminded her that she had seen some pretty distant (way back) things in space-time. The Andromeda was 2.5 million light-years away. Some of the Messier galaxies are really far back, to the time of the dinosaurs.