This is pretty cool. The universe began to form about 13.7 billion years ago (the "Big Bang" was a process, not a single event, so I don't really like to say the universe was "created" at the time, as some do.) Now scientists at UC Irvine have detected a couple of supernovas ("supernovae" if you want to be strictly correct about it) that are 11 billion years old. Stars are born and stars die all the time. An 11 billion year old supernova only gives you 2.7 billion years for the whole life cycle of a star, but the giants live and die at a much faster rate than smaller stars. To put this is context our sun is probably something more than 4 billion years old, perhaps as much as 5 billion. It's a case of bigger not necessarily being better, because the bigger the star, the shorter its lifespan. This whole cycle is pretty damned important for us too ... because there are elements present in our Solar System that can only be formed during a supernova, including small amounts even within human bodies. In other words, there has to have been at least one supernova in our area of space, and our Solar System has to have formed using some of the left-over fragments of that explosion. We're talking about cycles that are billions of years long ... and our puny human brains have trouble wrapping our brains around any concept beyond a few thousand. Except, oddly enough, when it comes to money, and then people seem to think that a trillion isn't a very big number. Go figure. (How much is a trillion seconds? See my "Wisdom of Heinlein" post.)