Because the object's light took this long to reach Earth, researchers say the find takes us back to an epoch when the universe was only some 480 million years old.
Elucidating the mysterious force, "dark energy", which has been invoked as the cause of the expansion, will require careful study of supernovae all the way back to the epoch of the earliest stars.
Known traditionally as the Old Red Sandstone, these rocks date back to the Ludlow Epoch in southern Norway, mixed with those of the Pridoli Epoch and early Devonian times in northern England, and early Devonian age in southeastern Ireland and Poland.
The development of this landscape dates back to Late Miocene epoch (c. 10 million years) when volcanoes spread pyroclastic deposits over an area of about 20,000 km20,000
Dr. Lisa Storrie-Lombandi, astronomermer at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, said the research indeed appeared to reach back to the first epoch of star formation.
A deposit of bones in the entrance chamber goes back to the Pleistocene epoch, which lasted from 2.6 million to 11,700 years ago.
Until now, the earliest known remains of a marsupial in the hemisphere dated back to the Paleocene Epoch, 55 million to 65 million years ago; this find suggests that marsupials were in the Southern Hemisphere during the late Cretaceous period, 65 million to 100 million years ago.
It is relict from a diverse evolutionary history (three families and 34 genera) extending back to the Eocene Epoch (55.8 million to 33.9 million years ago) of North America; some now-extinct forms also lived during Oligocene to Miocene times in Europe and Asia.
Some flora dates back to the Miocene epoch of 5 million B.C.
We can only extrapolate back to a certain epoch in time before the Big Bang's predictions break down.
Found in South Carolina among rocks dating back to the Oligocene epoch and christened Cotylocara macei, the fossil whale is named after Mace Brown, a curator at the College of Charleston's Mace Brown Natural History Museum in South Carolina who acquired the specimen for his private collection about a decade ago.
