Like a ship approaching a distant beacon, astronomers are getting closer and closer to the cosmic dawn, the time in the universe's history when the first stars formed. A team of researchers today announced that the Hubble Space Telescope has allowed them to see as far back in time as a mere 380 million years after the big bang—more than 13.3 billion years ago. That's within striking distance of the first stars, which researchers think were born 200 million years after the universe began.

More remarkable is the fact that the researchers, led by astrophysicist Richard Ellis of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, have imaged not one but seven galaxies from that early cosmic period, dating between 380 million and 600 million years after the big bang. The discovery provides the first census of galaxies from what's known as the epoch of reionization. During this period, which extended from the cosmic dawn to about 1 billion years after the big bang, ultraviolet light was breaking down hydrogen in the universe into a soup of electrons and protons, making the universe more transparent.

See the website for more details:http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2012/12/hubble-comes-close-to-spying-fir.html （SY）