Star exploded in far galaxy 7 Billion light years away - just mind boggling

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I read something on AOL news that I find just mind boggling and it challenges my belief system so curious on what others think about it. About a month ago there was a story on AOL news about a new light in the night sky you could see with the naked eye. Looked like a new star just appeared in the sky. It went on to say it was an explosion of some type of star that happened in a far galaxy 7 billion light years away. It explained one light year was something like 4.9 trillion years and this explosion happened long before earth was created and it just now reached earth for our viewing. Let me say that again... a star exploded long before earth was in existance and happened so far away it just now reached us. It added this shattered the previous known farthest galaxy of 210 million light years away. What a new discovery of distance...210 million light years jumps to 7 billion light years away. What is 7 billion times 4.9 trillion years anyway? That is after all how long ago this explosion took place. Can this story actually be true ...I mean is the AOL news the real deal or is it made up hocus pocus stories like certain tabloids? Frankly....this is difficult for me to comprehend and challenges my religious faith against scientific reasoning. Without getting into a deep religious debate I am curious what others think of this. I define Faith as believing in something that can't be proven or believe without evidence and I do have faith that there is one almighty creator but I admit my mind is, ..or the human brain is incapable of having the superior knowledge of an almighty creator so I simply developed a belief system starting with a time period around the time the earth was created or 100 million years or so near then. Now I am being introduced to scientific facts of recorded distances 7 billion light years away and time factors of 7 billion times 4.9 trillion years. Wow.... that is some serious measurements of time and distance and then leads to my next question... with such mind boggling measurements are we to actually believe we are the only intelligent life forms out there... Ok..well maybe you can argue the intelligent part assuming I probably have many typos in this post but surely we can be so niave to think there are no other life forms functioning in some form of a society in a galaxy billions of light years away. After all if we thought the farthest known distance was a galaxy 210 million light years away and now we discover it is 7 billion light years away ....well that pretty much says we don't know crap so anything imaginable is actually possible. What is your thoughts on this matter?