Astronomers making observations with the European Space Agency's (ESA) Planck Satellite believe they have identified the "oldest light" in the universe.
According to BBC News, the new observation places the first crop of stars some 560 million years after the Big Bang, rather than 420 million years. The astronomers were observing what they identified to be the Big Band's "afterglow," formally known as the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB).
"This difference of 140 million years might not seem that significant in the context of the 13.8-billion-year history of the cosmos, but proportionately it's actually a very big change in our understanding of how certain key events progressed at the earliest epochs," George Efstathiou, a chief scientist with the Planck Science Collaboration, told BBC News.
The scientists observed this stellar "fossil" between 2009 and 2013.
"We had two groups of astronomers who were basically working on different sides of the problem. The Planck people came at it from the Big Bang side, while those of us who work on galaxies came at it from the 'now side,'" Richard McMahon, from Cambridge University, told BBC News. "It's like a bridge being built over a river. The two sides do now join where previously we had a gap."
McMahon said the new findings "effectively solves the conflict" that existed with observations made with the Hubble Telescope.
"We're now being pushed into a parameter space we didn't expect to be in," Andrew Jaffe, of Imperial College, told BBC News. "That's OK. We like interesting physics; that's why we're physicists, so there's no problem with that. It's just we had this naïve expectation that the simplest answer would be right, and sometimes it just isn't."
