( CNN ) -- Australian scientists have dated a star thought to be the oldest yet discovered , and it 's right in our neighborhood -- astronomically speaking . The star , which has been given the name SMSS J031300.36-670839.3 , is thought by a team of astronomers at the Australia National University to be 13.6 billion years old . The star itself is not a new discovery -- it is faintly visible on existing photographic maps of the southern sky . But the recent dating places it as older than any other celestial body previously found . The star is part of our Milky Way galaxy and only around 6,000 light years from Earth , relatively close in astronomical terms . Stefan Keller , a research fellow at ANU 's Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics , published the findings in the scientific journal Nature . `` Stars act as time capsules , '' Keller told CNN . `` This one took a little sample of the universe at the time that is was formed ... and means we can study [ what the early universe was like ] in great detail . '' The discovery of the star 's age -- which dates it at only a hundred million years younger than scientific estimates of the age of the universe itself -- is significantly older than any previously dated stars . The oldest celestial bodies discovered thus far have been 13.2 billion years old . Keller and his team used the SkyMapper telescope to find ancient stars as part of an ongoing project to produce the first digital map of the southern sky . The team used a technique for imaging stars to ascertain how much iron was present -- the younger a star , the greater the amounts of iron it had . The SkyMapper telescope is unique in its ability to find stars with low iron , which uses sophisticated filters to measure the color of the stars , a key indicator of iron levels . `` The stars we are finding number one in a million , '' said team member Mike Bessell on the University 's website . The team looked at 60 million stars and narrowed down potential candidates to a shortlist of 200 , which were examined using the Magellan telescope in Chile . It is an important cosmological discovery , as it tells researchers a great deal about the origin of the elements that make up the universe . Keller said that most stars created in the early stages of the universe died in `` extremely violent explosions , '' and that it is unlikely that more stars of a similar age will be found .
A 13.6 billion-year-old star has been dated by Australian astronomers . The discovery of star 's age makes it the oldest celestial body ever found . Score: 8