When really big stars die, they explode in a big blast called a supernova. Supernovae are super bright, and that makes them easy to see from far away. Very far away. 11 Billion lightyears to be exact.

That’s the distance record that a group of authors is reporting in this week’s Nature. The authors combed through archival data from a digital survey conducted by the Canada-France Hawaii Telescope atop beautiful Mauna Kea, and they found three of the most distant supernovae ever.

Distance records are always popular, and so this story’s been getting a lot of pickup.

These supernovae came from an era when the universe was around 2.5 billion years old, but as Jeff Cooke at the University of California, Irvine, explained to on this week’s Nature podcast—they’re still older than the very first generation of stars, which existed when there was nothing but hydrogen and helium in the universe. Cooke hopes the fireworks from those first stars will be spotted soon using the same technique.

Image: Artist’s rendition of supernova / M. Weiss/NASA/CXC