Oldest Thing in the Universe

This article can be found at http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/10/20/science/space/AP-US-SCI-Oldest-Galaxy.html?_r=1&ref=science

    About an hour and a half ago, the Associated Press released some pretty big news in the realm of astronomy. In a study published Wednesday in Nature, astronomers from the Paris Observatory say they’ve found the oldest thing in the universe known to mankind. The first paragraph of the story presents this profound discovery with humor and clarity: “It’s a galaxy far, far away from a time long, long ago.” The second paragraph continues the stream of interesting/important information and context: “hidden in a Hubble Space Telescope photo released earlier this year is a small smudge of light that European astronomers now calculate is a galaxy from 13.1 billion years ago. That’s a time when the universe was very young, just shy of 600 million years old.”
   
    The rest of the story is just as good. It is concise with short paragraphs and contains pertinent quotations from leading scientists, such as one CIT astronomy professor clarifying the extremely ancient nature of the galaxy (and in turn, the extremely youthful state we see it in): “We’re looking at the universe when it was a 20th of its current age. In human terms, we’re looking at a 4-year-old boy in the life span of an adult.” Then the story focuses on the details of the study, and ends with a scientist’s quote on how far we really are looking out into space: “We’re looking almost to the edge, almost within 100 million years of seeing the very first objects.”