BBC: From 13.7 Billions years ago:
Astronomers have detected a faint glow from the first stars to form in the Universe, Nature journal reports.
This earliest group of stars, called Population III, probably formed from primordial gas less than 200 million years after the Big Bang.
These objects cannot be seen by any present or planned telescopes.
Nasa scientists detected the stars from the imprint they have left on the general glow of infrared radiation dispersed throughout the cosmos.
These first stars were huge thermonuclear furnaces; few and far between, but they burned ferociously
This glow, which is composed of radiation from stars past and present, is known as the Cosmic Infrared Background (CIB).
The observations used in the latest study were made by the Infrared Array Camera (Irac) on the US space agency's Spitzer Space Telescope.
The results present the first evidence for cessation of the so-called cosmic Dark Ages.
The term, coined by the English Astronomer Royal, Sir Martin Rees, refers to the period in cosmic history when hydrogen and helium atoms had formed but had not yet had the opportunity to condense and ignite as stars.
